الفهرس 
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Abstract
Demand for electrical power across the Middle East and North Africa region is growing rapidly due to the rising population, growing urbanization, and economic growth driven by industrialization. Egypt‘s energy crisis emerged in 2006-2007, when the country became a net oil importer. Over the next several years, energy subsidies skyrocketed until they accounted for almost 20 percent of all state expenditures. Egypt is suffering electricity shortages from its conventional sources and is grappling with distribution problems caused by the decay of its infrastructure. Current figures show that over 90 percent of all energy produced in Egypt still comes from fossil fuels, eight percent from hydroelectricity, and less than one percent from solar and wind combined. In 2014, the government of Egypt established a feed-in tariff scheme for electricity generated from solar and wind powered plants, according to Egyptian Electric Utility for Consumer Protection and Regulatory Agency (2015). The current plan in Egypt is to install a capacity of 2.3 GW of solar powered plants by 2017 (Elsobki, 2015).
The main aim of this work is to produce a high resolution Atlas for various solar radiation components over the entire area of Egyptian land, thus providing the beneficiaries with a product that meets all their needs and serves many aspects of scientific, research and economic activity in the various solar energy fields.
Because the surface measurements of solar radiation are not sufficient to well represent the entire area of Egypt, we decided to depend on the solar radiation data derived from the meteorological satellite images. In this context, this work was carried out in several stages representing the scientific method to produce this Atlas with the required reliability and accuracy. In the first phase of the work, seven meteorological stations (Barrani, Matruh, Arish, Cairo, Asyut, Kharga, Aswan) representative of the different climatic conditions of Egypt and in which solar radiation and meteorological parameters are measured were selected to constitute a ground-truth database against which to evaluate the indirect solar radiation retrieval methods. The elaborated database contains the solar radiation components data and the meteorological parameters collected in the period from 2004 to 2010. The data have been reviewed accurately and we have developed an original procedure for controlling the quality of the solar radiation data. This quality-checked database was used to test the accuracy of a number of Decomposition models currently used for retrieving the direct and diffuse components when only global radiation is measured.
The second stage of this work consisted in testing the Heliosat2 method that converts the observations made by Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite and generates the HelioClim-3 (HC3) database of the surface solar irradiation. Practically, the results of the validation of two different versions of the Meteosat-derived HelioClim-3 (HC3) database (HC3v4 and HC3v5) are presented and discussed using the high quality solar components measurements elaborated in the first part of this work. The validation is performed for all-sky conditions as well as in cloud-free conditions. In the latter case, another comparison is made with the estimates of the McClear database (Lefevre et al., 2013), itself based on the McClear model which predicts the surface solar irradiance (SSI) that should be observed if the sky were cloud-free.
Finally, because it yielded the best results, Version 4 of HelioClim-3 (HC3v4) was selected to produce maps of the monthly-averaged solar resource in Egypt. These maps, which cover the period 2005-2014 and have a spatial resolution of 3km, have been integrated in the ‗Solar Atlas for Egypt‘. This Atlas can be downloaded at no charge from the website (https://irena.masdar.ac.ae/GIS/?map=2465/) of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). This atlas comprises accurate maps of the global horizontal solar irradiation (GHI) and its direct normal (BNI) in addition to direct irradiation on a horizontal surface (BHI) and diffuse horizontal solar irradiance (DHI) components in Egypt.