The two extreme cases are such that the maximum insolation occurs between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice in one case and between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox in the other.
Insolation ranges between 1,200 and 1,700 kWh/m2/year.
"We wanted to understand what is really triggering glacial inception, and what we found is an amazingly simple function, which is the ratio between insolation around 65 north latitude and the CO2 content of the atmosphere," Schellnhuber said.
Early researchers also knew that there is an inverse relationship between insolation and the amount of sky covered by clouds (Kimball 1919).
The maximum solar radiation is available from March to April, and the minimum insolation is experienced between December and January [13, 30].
The phase relationship(s) between insolation variation, terrestrial paleoclimate, and atmospheric pCO2 during these events remains enigmatic however, due to their poorly constrained timing relative to specific orbital configurations.
Late Pleistocene paleoenvironmental records from northern Brazil reflect the interplay between insolation forcing of two hemispheres with the local components represented by the interannual shift of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone and the influence of seasonal equatorwards polar air incursions.
Our results strongly emphasise that the timing of the seasonal cycle must be taken into account in analyses of past monsoons, and that it may explain some of the leads and lags reported between insolation and various monsoon proxies reported in the literature.
The average coefficient of thermal performance (COP) of the system was 0.58, based on the thermal cooling power output per unit of available thermal solar energy from the 12 m2 Thermomax DF100 vacuum tube collector on a hot sunny day with average peak insolation of 800 W/m2 (between 11 and 13.30 h) and ambient temperature of 24 °C.
Concerning stand-alone systems, the incorporation of photovoltaic systems in water pumping applications is thought to be one of the most popular and ideal uses of solar energy exploitation, especially under the common allegation of coincidence between insolation and water demand.
