Solar irradiance represents one of the principal phenomena of interest in geophysics and recent research, especially which concerned with renewable energy, suggests that the complexity of solar irradiance time series offers important insights into the dynamics of different geophysical systems. We examined the complexity of the daily cumulative global horizontal irradiance (kWh/m²; dGHI in further text) recorded by satellite for 32 stations on the island of La Réunion over a 35-month period (2004–2006) using Kolmogorov complexity (KC) and a recently introduced measure—Aksentijevic–Gibson complexity (AG) which is capable of quantifying the complexity of both long and short strings. Previous examinations of physical data suggest that AG could represent a useful addition to the geophysical analysis toolkit. Our results demonstrate for the first time that running KC is capable of capturing periodic patterns in data and that AG is sensitive to both global/long-scale spatial and temporal structure and local/short-range complexity fluctuations. Importantly, we report a putative weekly periodicity which might be related to environmental factors and human activity. In conclusion, we suggest that AG could represent a useful tool in the study of solar irradiation time series but also with other types of geophysical data.

太阳辐照度是地球物理学感兴趣的主要现象之一，最近的研究，尤其是与可再生能源有关的研究表明，太阳辐照度时间序列的复杂性提供了对不同地球物理系统动力学的重要见解。我们检查了每日累积全球水平辐照度（kWh / m ²; dGHI（进一步的文本中的dGHI）是在35个月内（2004-2006年）由卫星记录的拉留尼昂岛上32个台站的数据，使用的是Kolmogorov复杂度（KC）和最近采用的测量值-Aksentijevic-Gibson复杂度（AG）量化长字符串和短字符串的复杂性。先前对物理数据的检查表明，AG可以代表地球物理分析工具包的有用补充。我们的结果首次证明，运行KC能够捕获数据中的周期性模式，并且AG对全局/长期的空间和时间结构以及局部/短期的复杂性波动均敏感。重要的是，我们报告了可能与环境因素和人类活动有关的假定的每周定期性。结论，