A study of solar radiation models for the coastal region of South China

A study of correlations for separating global solar irradiation into its components has been made on data from Macau, on the southern coast of China. For monthly mean daily totals, the correlations suggested by Page for determining diffuse irradiation from the clearness index, and by Rietveld for determining global irradiation from the sunshine duration, are confirmed; however, in the latter case a nonlinear form KT = 0.34 + 0.40 (SSm) + 0.17 log (SSm) gives improved predictions where SSm lies outside the range 0.2 to 0.6. For daily totals, the results of the study for Kd vs. KT confirm close similarity with the polynomial previously obtained by Rao et al.