In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for renewable energy due to the population growth and decline in fossil energy resources as well as the developing technology. Solar energy is the most important renewable energy source and the global solar radiation is the primary variable for evaluating solar energy systems. The main subject of this study is to show that there is enough solar energy potential in Turkey with using global solar radiation data of chosen region where is between Adana and Mersin cities. The new solar radiation models of selected region were developed with determining Angstrom coefficients and obtained results of new developed models were compared some models in the literature. In this study, the global radiation model correlations which were developed for Turkey and some other countries were investigated for selected region. The compatibility of some models in literature were tested by determining the nearest model to measured data. In addition to that climate data of selected region, four different new models were developed and brought into the literature. The performance of these proposed models has been examined at different regions. To comparative the efficiency of all used models the following statistical indicators were used: the percentage of the relative error, mean percentage error, analysis of variance, mean absolute percentage error, the squared relative error, total relative standard error, and T‐statistic. The obtained results reveal that the new proposed models gives very appropriate results for solar radiation estimation in selected region. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 37: 870–880, 2018