Transforming Solar Energy Forecasting with Machine Learning and Multi-Source Meteorological Data Fusion for Sustainable and Intelligent Energy Systems
摘要
This work presents a data-efficient framework for solar irradiance forecasting based on multi-source early fusion of high-resolution satellite and ground meteorological data. The methodology integrates multiplicative seasonal normalization, quantile-based bias correction tuned via sensitivity analysis and temporal encoding to accurately capture diurnal and annual patterns. A comprehensive benchmark across major regression families including linear, tree-based, support-vector, Gaussian-process, kernel and ensemble models demonstrates the limitations of static feature learners in this setting. The best regressor (linear model) achieves RMSE ≈ 162.5 W/m2 (R2 ≈ 0.76) whereas the proposed neural network time-series architecture reaches RMSE ≈ 50.4 W/m2 and R2 = 0.98 corresponding to ~ 69% error reduction relative to the strongest regressor. A Shapley interpretability assessment confirms the physical relevance of the dominant temporal and atmospheric predictors. Overall, the results establish a lightweight, interpretable and scalable forecasting framework tailored to sparse-data semi-arid environments and suitable for operational smart-grid planning.