  Solar radiation prediction is an important challenge for the electrical
engineer because it is used to estimate the power developed by commercial
photovoltaic modules. This paper deals with the problem of solar radiation
prediction based on observed meteorological data. A 2-day forecast is obtained
by using novel wavelet recurrent neural networks (WRNNs). In fact, these WRNNS
are used to exploit the correlation between solar radiation and
timescale-related variations of wind speed, humidity, and temperature. The
input to the selected WRNN is provided by timescale-related bands of wavelet
coefficients obtained from meteorological time series. The experimental setup
available at the University of Catania, Italy, provided this information. The
novelty of this approach is that the proposed WRNN performs the prediction in
the wavelet domain and, in addition, also performs the inverse wavelet
transform, giving the predicted signal as output. The obtained simulation
results show a very low root-mean-square error compared to the results of the
solar radiation prediction approaches obtained by hybrid neural networks
reported in the recent literature.
