Ahead-of-time forecasting of the output power of power plants is essential for the stability of the electricity grid and ensuring uninterrupted service. However, forecasting renewable energy sources is difficult due to the chaotic behavior of natural energy sources. This paper presents a new approach to estimate short-term solar irradiance from sky images. The proposed algorithm extracts features from sky images and use learning-based techniques to estimate the solar irradiance. The performance of proposed machine learning (ML) algorithm is evaluated using two publicly available datasets of sky images. The datasets contain over 350,000 images for an interval of 16 years, from 2004 to 2020, with the corresponding global horizontal irradiance (GHI) of each image as the ground truth. Compared to the state-of-the-art computationally heavy algorithms proposed in the literature, our approach achieves competitive results with much less computational complexity for both nowcasting and forecasting up to 4 h ahead of time.

Particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM _2.5 ) is one of the main pollutants that has considerable detrimental effects on human health. Estimating its concentration levels with ground monitors is inefficient for several reasons. In this study, we build a digital twin (DT) of an atmospheric environment by fusing remote sensing and observational data. Integral part of DT pipeline is a presence of feedback that can influence future input data. Estimated values of PM _2.5 obtained from an ensemble of Random Forest and Gradient Boosting are used to provide recommendations for decreasing the agglomeration levels. A simple optimization problem is formulated for computing the recommendations. Possible action policies, such as cloud seeding, scheduling of air filtering, and SMS notifications have been identified. The PM _2.5 estimation part of the proposed DT pipeline has achieved RMSE and R ² of 38.94 and 0.728 (95%, CI 0.717-0.740). In addition, we investigate different approaches for quantitatively examining the contribution of each independent variable.

Ahead-of-time forecasting of the output power of power plants is essential for the stability of the electricity grid and ensuring uninterrupted service. However, forecasting renewable energy sources is difficult due to the chaotic behavior of natural energy sources. This paper presents a new approach to estimate short-term solar irradiance from sky images. The~proposed algorithm extracts features from sky images and use learning-based techniques to estimate the solar irradiance. The~performance of proposed machine learning (ML) algorithm is evaluated using two publicly available datasets of sky images. The~datasets contain over 350,000 images for an interval of 16 years, from 2004 to 2020, with the corresponding global horizontal irradiance (GHI) of each image as the ground truth. Compared to the state-of-the-art computationally heavy algorithms proposed in the literature, our approach achieves competitive results with much less computational complexity for both nowcasting and forecasting up to 4 h ahead of time.