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:2411. 10921v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate forecasts of distributed solar generation are necessary to maintain grid stability amid the increased uptake of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems.
By Maneesha Perera, Julian De Hoog, Kasun Bandara, Hansani Weeratunge, Saman Halgamuge
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
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
PROSWIN is a probabilistic machine learning model that forecasts hourly solar wind speed at Earth up to four days ahead, using solar images and magnetograms processed by a deep neural network and distributional regression. It introduces a prediction score metric that rewards both timeline and high‑speed solar wind peak accuracy, achieving well‑calibrated uncertainties and superior performance on 14 years of data compared to existing models. The study highlights the importance of the 171 Å channel and demonstrates that probabilistic forecasts outperform single‑value models for both overall timelines and peak events.
By Daniel Collin, Yuri Shprits, Luca Chiarabini, Stefan J. Hofmeister, Nadja Klein, Guillermo Gallego
Engineering use of AI forecasting models requires not only high nominal accuracy but also predictable behavior under uncertain inputs. In photovoltaic (PV) forecasting, this requirement is especially challenging because numerical weather prediction (NWP) errors are temporally correlated, state dependent, and physically coupled across variables.