Project SINAG AERONET stations
in the Philippines

Dust accumulation on solar panels blocks the irradiance received by a PV system, thereby decreasing its efficiency and, on a broader scale degrading its lifespan. Project SINAG aims to quantify the intensity of dust accumulation and its impact on forecasting the country’s solar PV systems performance.

Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) is a dimensionless quantitative measure of solar radiation extinction that exhibits the amount of aerosol in the vertical column of the atmosphere over the observed area. At the same time, the Angstrom Parameter (AE) is a qualitative measure of aerosol particle size. Project SINAG aims to:

• compare satellite AOD products from MODIS, Himawari-8, and Fengyun-4A and be validated them with a ground-based AERONET sun photometer and experimental dust deposition analysis

• select the best satellite data that will accurately determine loss of efficiency due to dust.

In the early 2000s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), together with PHOtométrie pour le Traitement Opérationnel de Normalisation Satellitaire (PHOTONS), established AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network), a ground-based remote sensing aerosol networks around the globe. The initiative provides a readily accessible public domain database of spectral AOD observations obtained at several fixed wavelengths within the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) spectrum. We computed the datasets for three data quality levels:

• Level 1.0 AOD (Unscreened)

• Level 1.5 AOD (Cloud Screened), and

• Level 2.0 AOD

Project SINAG will utilize the AERONET Level 2.0 AOD data at 500 nm and its corresponding Angstrom Exponent of 440-675nm to validate the AOD data with different satellite aerosol products from 2015-2021.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration deployed three AERONET sites in the Philippines. The Manila Observatory hosts the one in Quezon City, which officially operated on January 18, 2009, and is still functioning today. The other one is in Notre Dame of Marbel University, which maintains the unit in Koronadal City. The operation started on January 1, 2001, and is running till the present. Both stations could cover 10 and 7 years of data, respectively, but only half of them were calibrated up to level 2. Lastly, El Nido Airport, housing the station in Palawan, operated just for 307 days between 2012 and 2013. Therefore, due to the lack of temporal resolution required by Project SINAG, we took it out of the study.

Reference:

AERONET. (2020, July 30). AERONET. Retrieved July 12, 2022, from https://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov/new_web/index.html