Analysing the Determinants of Surface Solar Radiation with Tree-Based Machine Learning Methods: Case of Istanbul

This study estimates both hourly and daily Downward Surface Solar Radiation (SSR) in Istanbul while determining the importance of variables on SSR using tree-based machine learning methods, namely Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), and Gradient Boosted Regression Tree (GBRT). The hourly and daily data of climatic factors for the period between January 2016 and December 2020 are gathered from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' (ECMWF) ERA5 reanalysis data sets. In addition to the meteorology data, hourly data of selected aerosols are obtained from the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change. Temperature, cloud coverage, ozone level, precipitation, pressure, and two components of wind speeds, PM₁₀, PM_2.5, and SO₂ are utilized to train and test the established models. The model performances are determined with the out-of-bag errors by calculating R-squared, MSE, RMSE, and MBE. The GBRT model is found to be the most accurate model with the lowest error rates. Furthermore, this study provides the variable importance in determining the SSR. Although all models provide different values for the variable importance; temperature, ozone level, cloud coverage, and precipitation are found to be the most important variables in estimating daily SSR. For the hourly estimation, the time of day (hour) becomes the most important factor in addition to temperature, ozone level, and cloud coverage. Finally, this study shows that the tree-based machine learning methods used with these variables to estimate hourly and daily SSR results are very accurate when it is not possible to measure the SSR values directly.