Geospatial Perspective Reprojections for Ground-Based Sky Imaging Systems

The intermittency of solar energy produces instabilities in power grids. These instabilities are reduced with an intrahour solar forecast that uses ground-based sky imaging systems. Sky imaging systems use lenses to acquire images concentrating light beams in a sensor. The light beams received by the sky imager have an elevation angle with respect to the device’s normal. Thus, the pixels in the image contain information from different areas of the sky within the imaging system field of view (FOV). The area of the FOV contained in the pixels increases as the elevation angle of the incident light beams decreases. When the sky imager is mounted on a solar tracker, the light beam’s angle of incidence in a pixel varies over time. This investigation formulates and compares two geospatial reprojections that transform the original Euclidean frame of the imager’s plane to the geospatial atmosphere cross section where the sky imager’s FOV intersects the cloud layer. One assumes that an object (i.e., cloud) moving in the troposphere is sufficiently far so the Earth’s surface is approximated flat. The other transformation takes into account the curvature of the Earth in the portion of the atmosphere (i.e., voxel) that is recorded. The results show that the differences between the dimensions calculated by both geospatial transformations are in the order of magnitude of kilometers when the Sun’s elevation angle is below 30°.