arXiv Machine Learning

Vision Transformers for Estimating Irradiance Using Data Scarce Sky Images

The paper introduces a dual‑framework Vision Transformer (ViT) method for estimating diffuse horizontal irradiance (DHI) from sky images in data‑scarce settings. It combines physics‑based atmospheric parameters, a sequential pipeline that first predicts synthetic global horizontal irradiance (GHI), and a dual‑parallel architecture that processes raw and physics‑informed overlay‑enhanced fisheye images. Tested on Chilbolton Observatory data, the approach achieves RMSE within 2–6 W/m² of a ViT trained on a full dataset, demonstrating a scalable, cost‑effective solution for solar resource assessment when long‑term sky imagery is limited.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Bidirectional Multimodal Fusion of Sky Images and Time-Series for Solar Forecasting with Large Language Models

The paper introduces SolCloudLLM, a large language model–based framework that fuses sky‑image patches with time‑series data through bidirectional multimodal fusion for short‑term solar forecasting. Experiments on the SIRTA and SKIPP'D datasets show that SolCloudLLM outperforms existing baselines, achieving up to a 25.4% reduction in mean squared error, especially under cloudy conditions and in few‑shot scenarios.

By Ken Chen, Maneesha Perera, Wei Wang, Sachith Seneviratne, Hansani Weeratunge, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

GateFormer: Forecast-Space Decomposition for Intra-Hour Solar Irradiance Prediction from Sky Images

GateFormer is a vision‑transformer model that forecasts intra‑hour global horizontal irradiance (GHI) from sky images by decomposing the forecast into a trajectory prediction and a delta prediction, then adaptively weighting these two outputs. It incorporates recent GHI measurements into the visual token stream, enabling self‑attention between image patches and irradiance data. On multiple benchmarks (NREL‑TSI, Chilbolton, SIRTA) GateFormer achieves the lowest final‑horizon root‑mean‑square error, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art transformers and demonstrating significant gains during rapid irradiance ramps.

By David Hamlyn, Sunny Chaudhary, Jonathon Hare, Tasmiat Rahman
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 22

GateFormer: Forecast-Space Decomposition for Intra-Hour Solar Irradiance Prediction from Sky Images

GateFormer is a dual‑decoder Vision Transformer that forecasts intra‑hour global horizontal irradiance (GHI) from sky images by embedding observed GHI into the visual token stream and predicting both a future GHI trajectory and the final‑horizon change. The two predictions are adaptively weighted in prediction space, with magnitude‑ and direction‑supervision to reduce remaining error. On multiple benchmarks, GateFormer achieves the lowest final‑horizon RMSE, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art transformers and showing significant gains especially during positive ramp events.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

SolarBench: A global solar energy nowcasting benchmark

SolarBench is an open global benchmark for image-based solar nowcasting that consolidates over six million sky and satellite images from 11 sites across a decade, paired with irradiance, PV output, and atmospheric data. The benchmark includes a toolbox for reproducible data access, processing, model development, and evaluation. Using SolarBench, the authors benchmark representative models, uncover a gap between average forecasting accuracy and the capture of rapid solar fluctuations, quantify predictability across cloud regimes, and demonstrate data‑efficient adaptation to new PV systems.

By Yuhao Nie, Stephen Campbell, Quentin Paletta, Liwenbo Zhang, Tao Jing, Samer Chaaraoui, Jonathan Giezendanner, Andea Scott, Tao Sun, Cong Feng, Max Aragon, Jacques Camier, Adam Jensen, Florian Kotthoff, Yuexing Yang, Yang Ming, Mengying Li, Stefanie Meilinger, Yupeng Wu, Adam Brandt, Sherrie Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

PBLH Estimation from Satellite Radiances via a Dual-Encoder Transformer

The paper presents a dual‑encoder Transformer model for estimating Planetary Boundary Layer Height (PBLH) from satellite radiances, addressing challenges of multimodal, spatially incomplete data. It benchmarks eight different approaches, analyzes model reliance via grouped Shapley decomposition, and demonstrates that the proposed architecture achieves a mean absolute error of 155.8 m on a global test set, outperforming all baselines. On out‑of‑distribution data from the TEAMx campaign, the model attains 165.3 m MAE, better than a pixel‑wise baseline trained on the same data.

By Lorenzo Innocenti, Luca Catalano, Edoardo Arnaudo, Claudio Rossi, Salvatore Larosa, Domenico Cimini, Paolo Garza
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Horizon-specific Expert Fusion for Photovoltaic Power Forecasting

The paper presents a hierarchical ensemble for short‑term photovoltaic power forecasting that fuses temporal neural models, historical analogs, state climatology, and gradient‑boosted trees with horizon‑specific convex weights. Solar geometry and numerical weather forecasts provide expected generation conditions, while a calibration step corrects recent bias using historical forecast errors. Evaluated on PVDAQ and GEFCom2014 data, the ensemble reduces mean absolute error by up to 6% compared to strong individual models, though its advantage varies with dataset and horizon.

By Xu Yuqing, Zhou Liguo, Sun Ze, Yu Lei, Jiang Mingming
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Tropospheric temperature and humidity profile retrieval from Meteosat Flexible Combined Imager based on deep learning

The study presents a spatially aware deep learning framework that retrieves all‑sky tropospheric temperature and humidity profiles from the Meteosat Third Generation Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) without relying on numerical weather prediction background fields. Using a Residual U‑Net trained on 14 months of collocated FCI observations and CERRA reanalysis data, the model achieves temperature biases below 0.4 K and relative humidity standard deviations between 12–20 %, with modest performance degradation under cloud cover. Ablation and feature‑sensitivity analyses confirm that incorporating spatial context across all 16 FCI channels, including visible and near‑infrared bands, improves retrieval accuracy, especially beneath cloud tops.

By Alejandro Salgueiro, Johannes Rausch, Julie Th\'er\`ese Villinger, Angela Meyer