A study of Artificial Neural Networks to Classify the 15 Standard Skies

In 2003, the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) adopted 15 standard skies that cover the whole probable spectrum of usual skies found in the world. Each sky represents a unique distribution. Once the standard sky has been identified, the sky irradiance and outdoor illuminance at any surfaces of interest can be obtained for subsequent investigations and complicated expressions for inclined surface models are not required. Standard skies can be categorized by various climatic parameters of which the selection depends on their availability, accuracy, suitability and frequency of occurrence at a given location. Artificial neural networks (ANN) represent a powerful tool for pattern recognition. They learn the relationship between the input elements and the controllable and uncontrollable parameters by studying previous recorded data. This study presents the work on the standard sky classification using the ANN techniques