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Spatio-temporal changes in sunshine duration over Iran: impact of physical geographic components

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Abstract

Current global emphasis is on finding and stimulating clean and renewable energy sources most suitable to given countries or regions. Iran as a country has particularly great potential for using solar energy given the relatively long daily sunshine duration. But understanding sunshine duration (i.e. solar energy potential) requires relevant spatio-temporal knowledge for both the recent past and future decades. We thus present a quantitative perspective on Iran's sunshine duration for the period 1981–2018 (based on station data) and future decades 2041–2080 (based on two modeled scenarios: RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). As might be expected, the findings demonstrate a variety of spatial and temporal changes in sunshine duration for coming decades, in part due to direct or indirect impacts associated with climate change. However, given that physical geographic factors (latitude, longitude, distance from permanent water bodies, elevation) influence sunshine duration across sub-regions of Iran, the effects of these factors are investigated for both the recent-past and future decades. Of these factors, the largest share of influence is latitude (58%), but this will decrease in share of influence to 53% in coming decades. In contrast, although longitude has had a small share of influence in recent decades (7.5%), its share of influence is projected to increase to 13.10% due to climate change by 2061 to 2080.

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Acknowledgements

The authors’ work was partially supported by the Council of Iran National Science Foundation under Grant No.97021735. The authors would like to thank the Council of Iran National Science Foundation for their support in the project.

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  1. Department of Geography, Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran

    Gholamreza Roshan & Abdolazim Ghanghermeh

  2. School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Stefan W. Grab

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  1. Gholamreza Roshan
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Roshan, G., Ghanghermeh, A. & Grab, S.W. Spatio-temporal changes in sunshine duration over Iran: impact of physical geographic components. Meteorol Atmos Phys 135, 28 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-023-00959-0

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