Urban WRF-Solar Validation and Potential for Power Forecast in New York City

Recent developments in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model have made it possible to accurately approximate solar power through the implementation of WRF-Solar. This study couples the WRF-Solar module with a multilayer urban canopy and building energy model in New York City (NYC) to create a unified WRF forecasting model called uWRF-Solar. Hourly time resolution forecasts are validated against ground station data collected at eight different sites. The validation is carried out independently for two different sky conditions: clear and cloudy. Results indicate that the uWRF-Solar model can forecast solar irradiance considerably well for the global horizontal irradiance (GHI) with an R squared value of 0.93 for clear sky conditions and 0.76 for cloudy sky conditions. Results are further used to directly forecast solar power production in the NYC region, where a power evaluation is done at a city scale. The outputs show a gradient of power generation produced by the potential available solar energy on the entire uWRF-Solar grid. In total, for the month of July 2016, NYC had a city PV potential of 233 kW/day/m² and 7.25 MWh/month/m².