Solar irradiance forecasting in the tropics using numerical weather prediction and statistical learning

The skill of the various models were evaluated using several metrics and statistical tests. We found that WRF-solar combined with our proposed statistical learning method outperformed smart persistence, a climatological forecast and GFS for day-ahead forecasts of irradiance. In particular, our model was shown to have a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) 23% lower than smart persistence.