Materials and Methods
The meteorological and climatic features of Galicia are monitored by a network made up by 93 weather stations, located all over the region covering the usual meteorological parameters. Ten - minute averaged data were collected for both monitoring and climatic studies. The network is managed by MeteoGalicia, the Galician weather service (www. meteogalicia. es). Currently, 25 stations provide the solar radiation measurements with Ph Schenk first class pyranometers (Philipp Schenk GmbH Wien & Co KG, Wien, Austria) and Kipp & Zonen sunshine duration sensors (Kipp & Zonen, Delft, The Netherlands) located in the most representative sites of Galicia. Moreover, 40 silicon cell sensor pyranometres (Skye Instruments LTD, UK), are installed in as many stations. These sensors are periodically cleaned and calibrated by specialized crew, following the manufacturer’s recommendations. Data are collected by dataloggers, sent to a central data server and stored in a database specifically designed for environmental data sets. Here, several filters are applied to ensure the data quality [10, 11].
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Fig. 1: Names and locations of the meteorological stations considered in this work, and location of the two pyranometers (at A Coruna and Vigo) used by Vazquez et al. [7]. |
As a part of the Solar Radiation subject’s programme, each student was required to choose one station between the 65 equipped with pyranometers and to analyse data between September 2006 and August 2007. The main features of these stations are listed on Table 1.
Data proceeding from every selected meteorological station have been processed to obtain monthly-averaged daily values of global irradiation, sunshine duration and clearness index. Measurements of precipitation, temperature and relative humidity have also been processed in order to complete the dataset for analysis.
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Table 1: Main features of the meteorological stations applied in the analysis.
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Finally, monthly and yearly values of global solar irradiation measured in the meteorological stations have been compared with the results obtained by Vazquez et al. [7].
The clearness index, KT, has been evaluated by the ratio G/G0, where G is the ground measured irradiation and G0 is the extraterrestrial irradiation. For this purpose, a solar constant value of
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1376 Wm-2 was adopted, as recommended by Davies [12]. Astronomical relationships were obtained following Iqbal [13].
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Fig. 2: Annual mean values of daily global solar irradiation (kJm-2) distribution over the region. Squares show the locations of the stations selected by the students and applied in this analysis.
Fig. 3: Annual values of (a) precipitation (mm) and (b) mean relative humidity (%) over the region.
Data for every station were collected, joined together and interpolated using Kriging technique, in order to get appropriate maps for analysis. Software package SURFER (http://www. ssg- surfer. com/) provided graphical representation of these results.
