1

Photovoltaic Power Forecasting Based on Artificial

Neural Network and Meteorological Data
Jiahao Kou, Jun Liu*, Qifan Li, Wanliang Fang

Zhenhuan Chen, Linlin Liu, and Tieying Guan

Dept. Electric Power Engineering

School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University
Xi'an, China
*Corresponding author: eeliujun@mail.xjtu.edu.cn

Dispatching and Communication Center

Gansu Electric Power Corporation
Lanzhou, China
yangcx@gs.sgcc.com.cn

Abstract--Due to the intermittency and randomness of solar

Photovoltaic (PV) power outputs, it is necessary to find a precise
method for PV power forecasting. However, conventional methods, using only temperature, humidity and wind speed data,
failed to obtain high accuracy when used to predict PV power
outputs under extreme weather conditions. Aerosol index which
indicates particulate matter in the atmosphere has a strong correlation with PV generated energy. This paper proposes a novel
photovoltaic power forecasting model considering aerosol index
data as an additional input. Based on weather classification and
back propagation artificial neural network approaches, the estimated results of the forecasting model show good coincidence
with the measurement data. And the proposed model is able to
improve the prediction accuracy of conventional methods using
artificial neural network.

to study the solar power output characteristics, combining with

weather data and solar radiation data. However, this method
requires large amount of data samples, and the fitting results
are sensitive to pathological data. Another method based on
Markov chain [5]-[7] also needs a large number of raw data,
but it shows higher accuracy even if some weather data are
omitted. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is also applied to
predict PV power outputs [8][9]. However, classical SVM algorithms are more suitable for two-classification cases, while
PV power forecasting is a typical multi-classification problem.

Index Terms--Photovoltaic Power Forecasting; Artificial Neural

Network Method; BP Network; Aerosol Index; Maximum Absolute
Prediction Error.

I. INTRODUCTION

O ensure reliable operation and economic dispatch of

modern power systems, generation schedules are made for
real-time, one-day-ahead, weekly, monthly and yearly power
markets. Hence it is essential to predict power system load
curves and power outputs of renewable power plants, such as
wind farms and Photovoltaic (PV) power stations.
As it is well-known that the outputs of solar power stations have high variations subject to different weather conditions, researches on PV power forecasting have been increasing
considerably in recent years. There are two commonly used
objectives for power forecasting at present: one is to predict the
environmental parameters relevant to the PV system, such as
solar radiation [1], then calculate the active power outputs with
solar radiation, ambient temperature and other parameters using predefined mathematical models. The other is to predict the
active power outputs of the PV systems directly [2]. Since solar
radiation data are difficult to predict on an hourly basis, the
active power outputs of the PV system are predicted directly in
this paper, based on the historical power outputs data and
weather forecast data of the objective day.
Various PV power output prediction methods have been
proposed up to present. Multiple linear regression [3][4] is used
This work was supported in part by "the Fundamental Research Funds for
the Central Universities" of China [No. xjj2013026], China Postdoctoral
Science Foundation [No. 2013M542349], and "Xian Jiaotong University
Innovation Fund for Undergraduate Research Training and Practice".
1

978-1-4799-2827-9/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

The most promising method for PV forecasting is the artificial neural network method [10][11], especially Back Propagation(BP) neural network. BP neural network has the advantages of complex nonlinear systems simulation, good approximation performance, strong learning ability and fault data tolerance. However, it also has some inherent defects, such as
slow convergence rate, easy to fall into local minimum value
and cannot get the global optimal solution, some improvements
have been made on BP network to enhance better convergence[12] -[15].
While predicting PV power outputs, few researches have
taken aerosols into consideration, which can be induced by
desert dust, biomass burning, volcano smoke, power plant
emission, and so on. In fact, there is a strong correlation between total solar radiation and aerosol index [16]-[18]. Typically, the higher the aerosol optical depth is, the greater the
attenuation of the solar power reaching the surface of the earth
is. Therefore, aerosols influence the output of the PV system
indirectly.
In this paper, a novel PV forecasting model is proposed,
based on multiple meteorological data including aerosol index
values. Firstly BP neural network is trained by historical meteorological data and hourly average output power data, and
then weather data of the objective day are used as the input
variables of BP neural network to predict hourly power outputs of PV systems. The efficiency of the proposed method is
validated by analyzing the mean absolute percentage error
between predicted values and measured values.
II. FORECASTING MODEL FOR PV OUTPUT POWER
Since there are various factors affecting PV power outputs, it is difficult to figure out the power outputs with a fixed
mathematical model. The unstable and nonlinear relationship
between power outputs and influencing factors implies that
different weather types will lead to significant variance in PV

power outputs. Therefore, the outputs should be predicted in

different weather types separately.

INPUT DATA FOR BP NEURAL NETWORK

Input Variables

x1 x12

In previous study, hourly PV output power, temperature,

humidity and wind speed data are chosen as the input variables of neural network. However, the prediction accuracy is
far than satisfied especially on heavily overcast or dusty days.
Therefore, aerosol index (AI) data are added as an input variable in the proposed model, which are provided by NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center [19]. AI is an index that detects
the presence of UV-absorbing aerosols such as dust and soot,
defined as:
AI = 100 log10 ( I 360 / I 331 ) measured log10 ( I 360 / I 331 ) calculated (1)

A simple linear correlation analysis is given for a twomonth period of data. As shown in Fig. 1, the daily total PV
generated energy has a correlation coefficient of -0.321 with
AI.

Physical Meaning of Variables

Hourly output power from 7:00 to 18:00

x13

Maximum humidity

x14

Minimum humidity

x15

Average humidity

x16

Maximum temperature

x17

Minimum temperature

x18

Average temperature

x19

Average wind speed

x20

Aerosol index

III. STRUCTURE OF BP NEURAL NETWORK

Artificial neural network is based on the idea of human
neurons and uses a large number of artificial neurons to imitate
the capabilities of neural network in the living creatures. Nowadays, BP neural network is one of the most widely used artificial neural networks because of its simplicity of implementation. It adopts a multilayered feed-forward topology. The
basic structure of a three-layer BP network is showed in Fig. 3.

Fig. 1. Linear Regression Curve of Daily PV Output in Relation to AI Values

Based on the analysis above, it is feasible and necessary to

introduce AI data to PV power output forecasting. A novel PV
power forecasting scheme is proposed as shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 3. The Structure of Three-Layer BP Network

Where, input variables are X = [ x1 , x2 , xn ] , hidden

T

layer units are H = [ h1 , h2 , hm ] , output variables are

T

Y =

[y , y
1

, yl ] . The weight connected between input

T

layer units and hidden layer unit h j is V = [ v1 , v2 , vn ] .

T

The weight connected between hidden layer units and output

Fig. 2. Principle of Power Forecasting Model for PV Systems

With the weather reports of the objective day, the PV forecasting model is able to select related data to predict the
power outputs. Specifically, the forecasting model will find
similar days with the same weather type in the same time period (15 days separately before and after the objective day) of
last three years as training samples. The solar radiation of these
days is supposed to be closest, so PV output curve will also be
similar in these days.
The input variables used in our forecasting model are described in TABLE I, including historical meteorological data
and PV output power data from similar days. Besides, AI data
are also chosen as an input variable. Comparisons will be made
with the average forecast errors of the forecasting model which
does not take aerosols into account.
TABLE I

unit y k is W = [ w1 , w2 , wn ] .
For output layer,
yk = f ( nk ) , k = 1, 2,..., l
T

nk = w jk h j + b, k = 1, 2,..., l

(2)
(3)

j =1

For hidden layer,

h j = f ( n j ) , j = 1, 2, ..., m

(4)

nj =

v x
ij

+ b, j = 1, 2,..., m

(5)

j =1

The transfer function of the neurons is the sigmoid function, which can be expressed as follows:

f ( x) =

1
1 + e x

(6)

A. Sunny Weather

Usually there is not a universal method to decide the number of hidden layer neurons. It is chosen to be 9 neurons in this
study, after repeatedly testing of the forecasting performance of
the neural network. The gradient decent method is applied in
the training process, which has a better convergence rate. Parameters of the network are shown in TABLE II.
TABLE II
PARAMETERS OF BP NEURAL NETWORK
BP Variables
Numbers
19 (without AI)
Number of input-layer neurons
20 (with AI)
Number of hidden-layer neurons

Number of output-layer neurons

12

(a)

Since the range of Equ.(6) is between 0 and 1, the training

data should be normalized before being applied in the BP neural network. The normalization of meteorological parameters
and PV output power data obeys:

xi =

xi xmin
xmax xmin

(7)

(b)
Fig. 4. Sunny Weather Without AI : (a) Output Power (b)Percentage Error

Where, xi is the ith component in the original input data vector; xmin and xmax are the minimum and maximum input data
separately?
In order to evaluate the accuracy of the estimated results,
Mean Absolute Prediction Error (MAPE) is introduced. MAPE
represents the variation of predicted values around measurement data and indicates the performance of the short-term forecasting.
MAPE =

100
N

i =1

| Pi f Pi a |
Pi a

(a)

(8)

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS AND COMPARISONS

The tested data are from the PV power system located in
Salem in Oregon State [20]. The rated power of the PV power
system is 1.12kW. Before prediction, the historical data (meteorological parameters and hourly output power) are classified
into several categories according to weather types. Then, the
historical data with the same weather type as that of the objective day are chosen as the training samples of the BP neural
network. With the well-trained BP neural network, PV power
outputs can be predicted by inputting the historical output
power of the similar day and the meteorological parameters of
the objective day. Finally, the predicted output power of the PV
power system will be compared with the measurement data, in
order to verify the validity of the proposed forecasting model.
The performances of the PV power forecasting model on sunny
and cloudy days are shown as follows.

(b)
Fig. 5. Sunny Weather With AI: (a) Output Power (b)Percentage Error

B. Cloudy Weather
PV active power outputs on cloudy days are smaller than
those on sunny days and the MAPE is larger in Fig. 6(a) and
Fig. 7(a).

(a)

VI. REFERENCES
[1]

[2]
[3]
(b)
Fig. 6. Cloudy Weather Without AI : (a) Output Power (b)Percentage Error

[4]

[5]
[6]

[7]
(a)
[8]
[9]

[10]

(b)
Fig. 7. Cloudy Weather With AI : (a) Output Power (b)Percentage Error
TABLE III
AVERAGE MAPE VALUES UNDER DIFFERENT WEATHER CONDITIONS
Without AI
With AI
Sunny
Cloudy

5.47%
10.33%

[11]

[12]

3.96%
6.57%

From the results of Fig. 5 and Fig. 7, it can be found that

the predicted PV power outputs match measurement data very
well for both sunny and cloudy weather conditions, which indicates that the proposed forecasting model in this paper can accurately predict the power generated by PV systems. Results in
TABLE III also verify the higher prediction accuracy for the
forecasting model using aerosol index. The precision is nearly
50% higher than that of the models without AI input.
V. CONCLUSION
As it is much more effective to obtain more meteorological data from outer atmosphere through modern remote sensing
technology, it is promising to use them for power forecasting
of renewable energy generation. A novel model is presented for
day-ahead PV power forecasting, based on BP neural network.
The proposed model with aerosol index data as an additional
input variable is able to reduce the average prediction error
greatly on both sunny and cloudy days. The simulation results
also perform well under other weather conditions. This approach shows that application of meteorological aerosol index
data from remote sensors will be a good support for conventional PV forecasting applications.

[13]
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[16]

[17]
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[19]
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