Characterization of Solar Irradiance Profiles for

Photovoltaic System Studies through Data Rescaling in

Time and Amplitude
Gianfranco Chicco
Politecnico di Torino
Energy Department
corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24
10129 Torino, Italy
gianfranco.chicco@polito.it
Valeria Cocina
Politecnico di Torino
Energy Department
corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24
10129 Torino, Italy
valeria.cocina@polito.it
Filippo Spertino
Politecnico di Torino
Energy Department
corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24
10129 Torino, Italy
filippo.spertino@polito.it

Abstract-This paper addresses the representation of the data
coming from solar irradiance measurements, to be used in
evaluations referring to the operation of photovoltaic systems.
Starting from the consideration that for different days of the
year the sunrise and sunset timings change and the solar
irradiance patterns at clear sky conditions occur with different
maximum amplitude, a bi-normalization procedure is applied in
order to produce comparable normalized patterns for the
various days. The normalized patterns are then subject to
clustering in order to obtain a meaningful grouping of similar
days. Finally, from the clustering results a day-type succession
matrix is constructed, whose entries are interpreted as the
conditional probability of finding a given day type providing
that the type of the preceding day is known. Data used in the
analysis are taken from real sites.
Index Terms--photovoltaic systems, solar irradiance, Moon-
Spencer model, time and amplitude rescaling, distributed
generation, data normalization.
I. INTRODUCTION
In the analysis of the productivity and performance of
photovoltaic (PV) systems, availability of actual
environmental data is a key aspect. These data mainly include
solar irradiance and temperature, while further data on
humidity, wind speed and wind direction may be useful to set
up refined models. At a given site, measurement of solar
irradiance provides a set of data at a given sampling rate. For
the purpose of characterizing the trends of the irradiation
obtained from the measured solar irradiance, a common
reference is the irradiation produced from the solar irradiance
data considered in the ideal conditions of a clear sky.
The theoretical instantaneous values of solar irradiance
obtained at clear sky on a surface orientated in any direction
are given by the Moon-Spencer model [1,2]. This model uses
a set of geometrical angles and the time equation representing
the lag or lead position of the Sun with respect to the clock.
In the Moon-Spencer model, the contributions to the solar
irradiance come from the global horizontal irradiance, the
horizontal diffuse irradiance and the beam normal irradiance.
This paper deals with the characterization of the solar
irradiance evolution in time, with the aim of identifying the
main features that can be used within a tool to represent the
photovoltaic production of a given site. The set of data
analysed are taken from two locations in the South of Italy.
The time period is one year, and the rate at which these data
have been gathered is one minute.
One of the main aspects is the creation of a framework to
compare the measured solar irradiance data with reference
data set up in a general framework. For this purpose, a
dedicated variable space is created, in which the time axis is
normalized in such a way to map the time interval between
the sunrise and the sunset in the (0,1) interval. The practice of
rescaling the time axis has been used in other references such
as [3]. In the same way, the solar irradiance values are
normalized in such a way that the unity value corresponds
with the conditions at clear sky taken from the Moon-Spencer
model. The combination of the two ways of performing
rescaling is a specific contribution of this paper. On these
bases, the measured data are handled in the new variable
space and may be characterized in a statistical way. The
results of the statistic characterization are used to provide
information to be sent to forecasting tools and to specific
tools in which suitable scenarios are constructed for analysing
the grid integration of the distributed generation from PV
sources.
The paper has four additional sections. In the second
section the evaluation of the solar irradiance is presented,
with the description of the experimental setup. In the third
section the representative results from simulation performed
are presented and discussed. The final section contains the
concluding remarks.

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 II. SOLAR IRRADIANCE EVALUATION
A. Description of the Experimental Setup
Measurements collected in two meteorological stations,
called synthetically “Gi” and “Ma”, placed in grid-connected
PV systems at latitude around 40° N, have been used. The
equipment of each station is the following:
• 1 pyranometer (ISO Secondary Standard) for measuring
the horizontal global irradiance Ghpyr, with spectral range
0.285 í 2.8 μm; sensitivity ≈ 10 μV/W⋅m-2; response time
≤ 5 s; zero offset < 10 W/m2; directional error (up to 80°
with 1000 W/m² beam) < 10 W/m2;
• 2 reference solar cells in crystalline silicon for measuring
the horizontal global irradiance;
• 2 reference solar cells in polycrystalline silicon with
South orientation for measuring the 30° tilted global
irradiance Gtcell;
• 1 thermo-hygrometer for measuring the ambient
temperature and the relative humidity;
• 1 anemometer with vane for measuring the wind speed.
All parameters have been recorded for the whole year 2012
with time step of 1 min. The global irradiance data from solar
cells on tilted plane has been validated through the
comparison with the pyranometer uncertainty.
Typical values of uncertainties are ≤ ±10 kWh/m2 on a
monthly basis in spring/summer period. Furthermore, these
values are the threshold within which the measurements of the
solar cell must be included for having the label of “acceptable
values”. The missing values are limited to a few readings in
some days. A comprehensive analysis of the experimental
results for the meteorological stations is presented in [4].
B. Correlations between the two sites
The “Gi” and “Ma” sites are located at a distance of about
70 km in a flat territorial region. The overall correlations
between the data of the two sites (for variable time step),
calculated with one-minute data and with the average of
groups of successive data (at 10 min, 15 min, 30 min and one
hour) are reported in the second row of Table I. The
correlation values are high, also because the set of data used
in this case considers all the data gathered during time
(including the night period), and the presence of the night
period causes a strong contribution to increase the correlation
values. The night period can be eliminated by deleting the
corresponding data. In order to keep uniformity in the number
of data for each day, it is possible to eliminate the data
uniformly from 19:30 pm to 5:30 am for all the days. This is
not equivalent to taking into account only the periods from
the sunrise to the sunset, but enables us using the raw data
gathered at each minute to compute the correlations. The
correlation results are indicated in the third row of Table I.
By eliminating the null values during the night, the
correlation values are clearly reduced, even though they
remain significantly high. On the basis of these
considerations, the calculations presented in this paper will
refer to only one of the sites, namely, the “Gi” site.
TABLE I.
CORRELATION VALUES CALCULATED FROM MEASURED DATA AT 1
MIN AND AVERAGED AT DIFFERENT TIME INTERVALS
correlation 1-min 10-min 15-min 30-min 1 hour
measured average average average average
24-hour data 0.928 0.945 0.949 0.956 0.963
excluding
19:30 pm – 0.905 0.930 0.934 0.943 0.952
5:30 am
C. Data rescaling in time and solar irradiance amplitude
C.1. Rationale for applying the rescaling procedure
For the “Gi” site, Fig. 1 shows the superposition of the
solar irradiance plots obtained for each clear sky day of the
year by using the Moon-Spencer model with photovoltaic
modules located on the horizontal plane and on a tilted plane
(angle of 30°). It is apparent that the clear sky conditions are
not represented by the same line throughout the year. There
are two major sources of variation, one on the horizontal axis
(due to the differences among the sunset and sunrise hours
along the year), and one on the vertical axis (due to the
different Sun position at noon during the year).
These differences express the rationale for using the
specific bi-normalization proposed in this paper, in which
both the time (horizontal) axis and the solar irradiance
(vertical) axis are normalized to the range (0,1).
From Fig. 1 it can be seen that higher advantages of the
normalization appear for surfaces orientated with low tilt
angle (as it may occur in some building-integrated solutions),
for which the difference between the solar irradiance at clear
sky conditions for the days with the lowest and the highest
values of solar irradiance at noon becomes more significant
(e.g., on the horizontal plane this ratio would be close to 2).
Fig. 1. Evolution in time of the solar irradiance in clear sky conditions.
The results of using normalized solar irradiance are shown
in Fig. 2 for two days in March and July, respectively. The
variables nGtcell and nGt(θ) are the normalized tilted global
irradiance found from the measurements and the Moon-
Spencer model, respectively, being θ the angle between the
solar beam and the direction orthogonal to the tilt plane [1].
Correspondingly, on the horizontal axis the time period
before the sunrise and after the sunset has been cut off. From
these plots, a number of aspects can be noticed:
- The number of minutes represented during the day is quite
different. In order to obtain comparable patterns, the
number of points describing the patterns has to be the
same. For this purpose, a common number of points N has
to be chosen, applying a suitable routine based on data
 interpolation (such as the one illustrated in [5]) in order to
form the new data sets for the daily patterns. The patterns
from the Moon-Spencer model are generated for each
minute and are treated in the same way as the patterns
with measured data.
- When the data sampling is relatively fast, the
phenomenon of broken clouds appears [4], according to
which there are measured solar irradiance values that
exceed significantly the values at clear sky conditions,
followed by other values much lower than the values at
clear sky conditions (as it can be seen in Fig. 2a). This
effect can be mitigated by averaging a number of
successive points in order to represent the pattern in a
smoothed way with a lower number of points.
- The occurrence of cloudy sky conditions even in days
with prevailing clear sky is not subject to any regularity
throughout the year, so that different patterns representing
the same qualitative sky condition may differ by the
position of the cloudy portion of the pattern. This issue
can be mitigated by representing the pattern with an
ordered set of points, losing the succession in time of the
points but preserving the qualitative representation of the
sky conditions.
a) March day
b) July day
Fig. 2. Normalized solar irradiance for two days.
C.2. Data input for identifying groups of similar days
In order to prepare the data input for the clustering
procedure, two types of patterns have been considered:
- Normalized patterns (horizontal and vertical).
- Differences between the normalized patterns and the
normalized Moon-Spencer model.
In addition, the patterns have been taken both in the initial
succession of points, and as an ordered sequence of points (in
the ascending order). Subsequently, four types of data input
for clustering with normalized patterns are considered:
1. NP: clustering with normalized patterns (N points for each
pattern).
2. ONP: clustering with ordered normalized patterns (N
points for each pattern).
3. NPR: clustering with base patterns with reduced number
of points (e.g., by grouping Ns successive points, the
clustering is run with N/Ns points). In order to prepare the
data input properly, namely, grouping the entire set of N
points, Ns has to be chosen such that N is a multiple of Ns.
4. ONPR: clustering with ordered patterns determined from
the normalized patterns with reduced number of points
(with the same type of grouping of the NPR case).
When the differences between the normalized patterns
and the normalized Moon-Spencer model are considered as
inputs, the four data inputs are indicated with ND, OND,
NDR and ONDR, respectively.
C.3. Clustering procedure
The k-means clustering [6] procedure is used for creating
the groups of days, resulting in K clusters. This clustering
method has the advantage of creating averaged groups, while
other clustering algorithms (such as hierarchical clustering)
tend to perform better in identifying the outliers [7].
The output of the clustering algorithm is the vector c =
{cm} ∈ ℵM,1 with length equal to the number of days,
containing for each day the number of the cluster to which the
pattern corresponding to that day has been assigned by the
clustering process.
On the basis of the clustering results, the attributes
associated to the clusters are defined, typically resorting to a
terminology that makes it possible to identify for each cluster
the characteristics of the days, e.g., clear sky, quasi-clear sky,
…, up to cloudy sky. An application example is shown in
Section III.B. The corresponding attributes are included in the
vector a = {a1, …, aK} ∈ ℵK,1.
C.4. Day-type succession matrix
In order to provide useful information to represent the
relations between successive days on the basis of the input
data and of the clustering results, the day-type succession
matrix D = {dij} ∈ ℜK,K is introduced here. In this matrix, the
row i indicates the preceding day with attribute ai, the column
j indicates the day under consideration with attribute aj, and
the value dij represents the number of occurrences for which a
day with attribute ai has been followed by a day with attribute
aj in the data analysed. For example, if a1 identifies clear sky
and a2 indicates quasi-clear sky, d12 = 15 means that 15
occurrences have been found in which a day denoted as clear
sky is followed by a day with quasi-clear sky.
In practice, the entries of the matrix D are determined by
starting from an empty matrix and adding a unity value to the
position defined by components of the vector c, namely, the
row cm-1 and the column cm, for m = 2,…, M (the component
m = 1 is not used, since there is no preceding day). The sum
of the entries of the matrix D is M-1.
 III. SIMULATION STUDY RESULTS identified in a similar way by using all the types of pre-
A. Data input processing. In fact, in all the resulting partitioning there is a
One year of data gathered from the “Gi” site at one minute cluster composed of a number of patterns ranging from 54 to
rate have been used for the case study application. The solar 59, containing the days far from the clear sky conditions.
irradiance patterns for all the days are rescaled in order to be However, for visualization purposes, using 1000 points it is
represented with N points in the horizontal interval (0,1). In less immediate to see the differences of this cluster with
the examples presented in this paper, the common number of respect to the other ones, and the use of a reduced number of
points to represent the patterns has been chosen as N = 1000 points facilitates the identification of this type of cluster.
points (of the same order as the number of minutes from the Focusing our attention to the four clusters, the following
sunrise to the sunset for the site analysed), and the definitions can be provided to the types of day:
interpolation has been applied by using the procedure - Clear sky (cluster 2 ONPR and cluster 4 ONDR)
presented in [5]. The reduced number of points has been - Quasi-clear sky (cluster 4 ONPR and cluster 3 ONDR)
chosen as Ns = 20, i.e., with a value relatively low, but higher - Quasi-cloudy sky (cluster 1 ONPR and cluster 1
than the number of hours ranging from the sunset to the ONDR)
sunrise in the Summer season. The reduced points have been - Cloudy sky (cluster 3 ONPR and cluster 2 ONDR)
found by averaging groups of 50 successive points from each
C. Day-type succession matrix
pattern represented with 1000 points.
From the clustering results, the day-type succession
In the following part of this paper, for the sake of clarity
matrix D, partitioning of the 365 successive days of the 366
and of comparison among the different types of pre-
days (as the first day has no preceding day) is shown in Table
processing, the normalized time interval is represented in
X by using ordered normalized patterns and reduced data
terms of the number of points used for the pattern
(ONPR), and in Table XI by using ordered differences
representation. Fig. 3a shows the normalized patterns of solar
between the normalized patterns and reduced data (ONDR).
irradiance (in which the values higher than unity occur
The results show that the matrix D entries depending on the
because of the broken clouds) and Fig. 3b shows the ordered
clustering results are relatively different. This is an effect of
normalized solar irradiance patterns.
the k-means algorithm, that tends to create homogeneous
groups. The variety of the input data in the case studied is
such that changing the type of data input the results may
change significantly.
TABLE X.
DAY-TYPE SUCCESSION MATRIX (ONPR DATA INPUT)
a) normalized solar irradiance patterns clear quasi-clear quasi-cloudy cloudy
clear 42 15 16 7
quasi-clear 13 24 30 15
quasi-cloudy 17 25 96 11
cloudy 8 18 7 21
TABLE XI.
DAY-TYPE SUCCESSION MATRIX (ONDR DATA INPUT)
b) ordered normalized solar irradiance patterns clear quasi-clear quasi-cloudy cloudy
Fig. 3. Pattern representations with normalized solar irradiance. clear 13 17 18 15
quasi-clear 12 112 33 9
B. Clustering results quasi-cloudy 20 28 22 10
The k-means clustering has been run for all the types of cloudy 18 9 7 22
data input. The results are shown in the following figures
(from Fig. 4 to Fig. 11) and tables (from Table II to Table IX Starting from a given day, from the entries of the matrix D
- next page). For each type of data input, the clustering results it can be assessed which is the conditional probability that the
are represented by using the normalized patterns also when successive day will be of any of the types of day defined. For
different data (e.g., the ordered normalized patterns) are used this purpose, the entries of the matrix D are elaborated by
as inputs for the clustering procedure. calculating inside each rows the conditional probabilities of
From the above results, it emerges that the solutions with finding a given type of day under analysis, provided that the
visually clearer distinction among the patterns are obtained day type of the preceding day is known. As an example,
by using the ordered normalized patterns with 20 points Table XII shows the results referring to the ONPR data input
(ONPR, Fig. 7) or the ordered normalized pattern differences and to the results of Table X. These results can be used to
with 20 points (ONDR, Fig. 11) as features to run the construct different scenarios with meaningful successions of
clustering procedure. In practice, the days with cloudy sky are day types in each scenario.
 TABLE II. NORMALIZED PATTERNS, 1000 POINTS TABLE VI. NORMALIZED PATTERN DIFFERENCES, 1000 POINTS
Cluster (NP data) 1 2 3 4 Cluster (ND data) 1 2 3 4
number of components 50 43 216 57 number of components 216 53 41 56

cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4 cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4

Fig. 4. Clustering results from normalized irradiance patterns (1000 points). Fig. 8. Clustering results from normalized pattern differences (1000 points).
TABLE III. ORDERED NORMALIZED PATTERNS, 1000 POINTS TABLE VII. ORDERED NORMALIZED DIFFERENCES, 1000 POINTS
Cluster (ONP data) 1 2 3 4 Cluster (OND data) 1 2 3 4
number of components 81 54 77 154 number of components 69 58 158 81

cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4 cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4

Fig. 5. Results of the clustering based on the ordered normalized patterns Fig. 9. Results of the clustering based on the ordered normalized pattern
(1000 points), and normalized patterns corresponding to the same clusters. differences (1000 points) and corresponding normalized patterns.
TABLE IV. NORMALIZED PATTERNS, 20 POINTS TABLE VIII. NORMALIZED PATTERN DIFFERENCES, 20 POINTS
Cluster (NPR data) 1 2 3 4 Cluster (NDR data) 1 2 3 4
number of components 56 87 78 145 number of components 59 70 186 51

cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4 cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4

Fig. 6. Clustering results based on ordered normalized patterns (20 points). Fig. 10. Clustering results from normalized pattern differences (20 points).
TABLE V. ORDERED NORMALIZED PATTERNS, 20 POINTS TABLE IX. ORDERED NORMALIZED DIFFERENCES, 20 POINTS
Cluster (ONPR data) 1 2 3 4 Cluster (ONDR data) 1 2 3 4
number of components 82 81 54 149 number of components 63 56 80 167

cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4 cluster 1 cluster 2 cluster 3 cluster 4

Fig. 7. Results of the clustering based on the ordered normalized patterns (20 Fig. 11. Results of the clustering based on the ordered normalized pattern
points), and normalized patterns corresponding to the same clusters. differences (20 points) and corresponding normalized patterns.
 TABLE XII.
PROBABILITY OF FINDING A GIVEN TYPE OF DAY UNDER ANALYSIS
KNOWING THE TYPE OF PRECEDING DAY (ONPR DATA INPUT)
preceding day under analysis
day clear quasi-clear quasi-cloudy cloudy total
clear 53% 19% 20% 9% 100%
quasi-clear 16% 29% 37% 18% 100%
quasi-cloudy 11% 17% 64% 7% 100%
cloudy 15% 33% 13% 39% 100%
D. Variation of the number of clusters
Further details can be observed by increasing the number
of clusters. For example, Fig. 12 shows the results obtained
by running the clustering procedure with K = 12 by using the
ONPR data input. In this case, the definitions of the types of
days become more various, but clearly the pattern grouping is
better defined. The number of cells of the matrix D becomes
K2 = 144. Since the number of entries to be located in the
matrix is M-1 = 365, many of these cells will contain very
low numbers or even zeros, making it difficult to associate a
probabilistic meaning to the succession of the days. The
situation could be improved by analysing data for very long
time periods, i.e., many years. As such, conceptually the
construction of a “large size” D matrix may be useful when
the input data contain measurements taken for several years.
Fig. 12. Clustering results with ONPR data input and K = 12 clusters.
Horizontal axis: number of points. Vertical axis: normalized solar irradiance.
IV. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Dealing with photovoltaic systems data affected by
uncertainty, daily and seasonal effects, as well as the presence
of a number of null values during the 24 hours, raises the
issue of comparability among the data in order to analyse the
characteristics of sunny, partially clouded or cloudy days
occurring during the year. This paper has illustrated a novel
way to pre-process the solar irradiance data by carrying out
normalization on both the horizontal (time) axis in order to
make the time periods comparable, and the vertical
(amplitude) axis to make the solar irradiance comparable.
With this normalization, followed by suitable interpolation
of the data gathered in order to express all the patterns with
the same number of points within the normalized time
interval, the patterns have been sent to a clustering procedure
in order to find out an appropriate grouping of the days and to
discover the characteristics of the time periods in which there
is no clear sky.
Different constructions of the features representing the
patterns that are sent to the clustering procedure have been
considered, and the best solutions have been indicated as the
ordered normalized patterns and the ordered normalized
pattern differences (with respect to the reference Moon-
Spencer model of solar irradiance at clear sky). An
exemplificative clustering with four clusters has been run by
using the k-means method, identifying four day types, and
posterior probabilities of transition between the different
types of day identified by clustering have been calculated. A
further case with a larger number of clusters has shown the
possibility of gaining details on the representation of the
characteristics of different days, reducing in this case the
possibility of using information obtained from the day-type
succession matrix D to carry out a statistical analysis of the
conditional probability that starting from a known type of day
the successive day will be of a given type of day. Indeed, the
choice of the number of clusters to be used may be discussed
on the basis of the compromise between the need of having a
low number of clusters to make the definition of the different
types of day more intuitive and to get better statistical
information from the day-type succession matrix, and the
need for representing the types of day in more details in order
to define the characteristics of the clusters more clearly.
The results are being used by the authors to generate
relevant scenarios to express the patterns of solar irradiance at
the given sites. Furthermore, by associating the model of the
solar arrays, it will be possible to create suitable patterns of
power production that take into account the real evolution of
the ambient variables.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research leading to these results has received funding
from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme
FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 309048, project
SiNGULAR (Smart and Sustainable Insular Electricity Grids
Under Large-Scale Renewable Integration).
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