A Novel Metric for Evaluation of Solar Forecasting Models

This work presents an alternative, time-window invariant metric for evaluating the quality of solar forecasting models. Conventional approaches use statistical quantities such as the root-mean-square-error and/or the correlation coefficients to evaluate model quality. The straightforward use of statistical quantities to assign forecasting quality can be misleading because these metrics do not convey a measure of the variability of the time-series included in the solar irradiance data. In contrast, the quality metric proposed here, which is defined as the ratio of solar uncertainty to solar variability, compares forecasting error with solar variability directly. By making the forecasting error to variability comparisons for different time windows, we show that this ratio is essentially a statistical invariant for each forecasting model employed, i. e., the ratio is preserved for widely different time horizons.