LAUSR

The Sun is a larger planent which emits light and heat to the Earth for many applications such as solar heating, cooking, drying and interior illumination of buildings. Solar radiation data are required by solar engineers, architects, agriculturists and hydrologists for many applications. In the past, several empirical correlations have been developed in order to estimate the solar radiation around the world. The main objective of this study is to review the global solar radiation models available in the literature. There are several formulae which relate global radiation to other climatic parameters such as sunshine hours, relative humidity and maximum temperature. In this paper, the models are classified into three viz: models based on ratio (H/H o ), non-linear models and models based on empirical coefficients ‘a’ and ‘b’.