Estimation of Global Horizontal Insolation over the Korean Peninsula Based on COMS MI Satellite Images

Recently, although many efforts have been made to estimate insolation over Korean Peninsula based on satellite imagery, most of them have utilized overseas satellite imagery. This paper aims to estimate insolation over the Korean Peninsula based on the Korean stationary orbit satellite imagery. It utilizes level 1 data and level 2 cloud image of COMS MI, the first meteorological satellite of Korea, and OMI image of NASA as input data. And Kawamura physical model which has been known to be suitable for East Asian area is applied. Daily global horizontal insolation was estimated by using satellite images of every fifteen minutes for the period from May 2011 to April 2012, and the estimates were compared to the ground based measurements. The estimated and observed daily insolations are highly correlated as the R-2 value is 0.86. The error rates of monthly average insolation was under +/- 15% in most stations, and the annual average error rate of horizontal global insolation ranged from -5% to 5% except for Seoul. The experimental results show that the COMS MI based approach has good potential for estimating insolation over the Korean Peninsula.