Intermittency study of global solar radiation under a tropical climate: case study on Reunion Island

Abstract

Abstract The arbitrary order Hilbert spectral analyses are applied to study the intermittency and multifractality of Global Horizonal Irradiation (GHI) based on one available high sampling rate of 1-year GHI records located at Saint-Denis (Moufia) over Reunion Island. The scaling exponents $$\xi \left( q \right)$$ ξ q is estimated through the arbitrary order Hilbert spectral analyses, and three parameters: Hurst exponent (H), the fractal co-dimension (C 1), and Lévy parameter ( $$\alpha$$ α ) are taken to study the multifractal process of the GHI in the sub-daily, daily fluctuations and also in seasonal variations. A power law behaviour with a spectral exponent β = 1.68 close to the Kolmogorov spectrum is detected through Fourier spectrum analysis, which indicates that the sub-daily fluctuations of GHI are nonstationary. The scaling exponent ζ(q) is then estimated by the arbitrary order Hilbert spectral analysis and the multifractal properties is detected. The log-stable model parameters $$H,{ }C_{1}$$ H , C 1 and $$\alpha$$ α characterize the concavity of the scaling exponent ζ(q) for analysing the intermittency of GHI. The classification method is applied to the daily GHI for analysing the distribution of the daily intermittency process and five classes with GHI and K b are obtained.