Comparison of hourly surface downwelling solar radiation estimated from MSG-SEVIRI and forecast by the RAMS model with pyranometers over Italy

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of two global horizontal solar irradiance (GHI) estimates, one derived from Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) and another from the 1-day forecast of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) mesoscale model. The horizontal resolution of the MSG-GHI is 3 x 5 km(2) over Italy, which is the focus area of this study. For this paper, RAMS has the horizontal resolution of 4 km.