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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Fuzzy logic and meteorological variables: a case study of solar irradiance

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Solar irradiance is an extreme case of an uncertain variable when measured on an hourly, or shorter time interval. In this paper solar irradiance has been considered as a case study for physical fuzzy modelling of a climate variable. The uncertainty of the solar irradiance is treated as a fuzzy uncertainty whilst other variables are considered crisp. The approach is robust as it does not rely on statistical assumptions, and it is a possible alternative to modelling complex systems. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a physical model of a meteorological variable based on fuzzy numbers has been proposed. Previous rule-based fuzzy meteorological models are only descriptive, and cannot be extrapolated to non-measured cases. When compared with previous non-fuzzy models of solar irradiance, the fuzzy model shows an improved performance, and when compared with experimental data, the performance can be evaluated by fuzzy indices that take into account the uncertainty of the data and the model output.