Assessing the transferability of support vector machine model for estimation of global solar radiation from air temperature

•Transferability of SVM in estimation of solar radiation is investigated.•Radiation at estimation site could be well estimated by SVM developed at source site.•A strategy for selecting a suitable source site is presented.•SVM accuracy is affected by distance and temperature difference between two sites.•RMSE of SVM shows logarithm or linearly relationship with altitude of source site.