Under cloudless conditions. the effect of atmospheric variables, such as turbidity or water vapour, on luminous efficacy is an important source of variability, often limiting the use of simple empirical models to those sites where they were developed. Due to the complex functional relationship between these atmospheric variables and the luminous efficacy components, deriving a non-local model considering all these physical processes is nearly impossible if standard statistical techniques are employed. To avoid this drawback, the use of a new methodology based on artificial neural networks (ANN) is investigated here to determine the luminous efficacy of direct, diffuse and global solar radiation under cloudless conditions. In this purpose, a detailed spectral radiation model (SMARTS) is utilized to generate both illuminance and solar radiation values covering a large range of atmospheric conditions. Different input configurations using combinations of atmospheric variables and radiometric quantities are analyzed. Results show that an ANN model using direct and diffuse solar irradiance along with precipitable water is able to accurately reproduce the variations of the three components of luminous efficacy caused by solar zenith angle and the various atmospheric absorption and scattering processes. This proposed model is considerably simpler than the SMARTS radiation model it is derived from, but still can retain most of its predicting power and versatility. The proposed ANN model can thus be used worldwide, avoiding the need of using detailed atmospheric information or empirical models of the literature if radiometric measurements and precipitable water data (or temperature and relative humidity data) are available. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.