Day-Ahead Probabilistic Forecast of Solar Irradiance: A Stochastic Differential Equation Approach

In this work, we derive a probabilistic forecast of the solar irradiance during a day at a given location, using a stochastic differential equation (SDE for short) model. We propose a procedure that transforms a deterministic forecast into a probabilistic forecast: the input parameters of the SDE model are the AROME numerical weather predictions computed at day D -1 for the day D. The model also accounts for the maximal irradiance from the clear sky model. The SDE model is mean-reverting towards the deterministic forecast and the instantaneous amplitude of the noise depends on the clear sky index, so that the fluctuations vanish as the index is close to 0 (cloudy) or 1 (sunny), as observed in practice. Our tests show a good adequacy of the confidence intervals of the model with the measurement.