Modeling the performance of some concentrating solar systems for thermal power plants may require high temporal resolution irradiance as input, in order to account for the impact of the cloud transient effects. This work proposes a simple method of generating synthetic irradiance of 10-min intervals from the hourly mean values. Boundary conditions are imposed to preserve the expected behavior under clear sky situations. The procedure consists basically on adding a random fluctuation, which characteristic amplitude depends on the sky conditions, to the hourly interpolated values. The assessment of the method with ground data have shown to main aspects to remark: daily and monthly means from the synthetic data are below 5% of root mean squared deviation compared to the original time series; despite the noticeable uncertainty in the 10-min synthetic irradiance values, the dynamic behavior of the fluctuations is comparable to the original data. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.