Short-term cloud coverage prediction using the ARIMA time series model

In view of the important role of cloud coverage on the solar (energy) irradiance, the total cloud coverage prediction based on ground-based cloud images is studied in this paper. In traditional prediction techniques, the correlation between cloud coverage over continue time is always neglected. Thus, an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time series model is used to predict the short-term cloud coverage. Experimental results on a collected time series database of cloud coverage computed from ground-based cloud images show that the correlation information of time series is useful for cloud coverage prediction. Additionally, the ARIMA model gains a superior prediction performance for forecasts of one minute or longer 20 and 30 minutes. We are able to predict the cloud coverage with an approximate error of 5%, 7%, and 9% for 1, 5, and 20 and 30 minute forecasts, respectively. Furthermore, we found that there are different error rates of predictions for different cloud coverage intervals. High cloud coverage always suffers from a higher error rate.