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Developing an accurate and robust prediction of long-term average global solar irradiation plays a crucial role in industries such as renewable energy, agribusiness, and hydrology. However, forecasting solar radiation with a high level of precision is historically challenging due to the nature of this source of energy. Challenges may be due to the location constraints, stochastic atmospheric parameters, and discrete sequential data. This paper reports on a new hybrid deep residual learning and gated long short-term memory recurrent network boosted by a differential covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (ADCMA) to forecast solar radiation one hour-ahead. The efficiency of the proposed hybrid model was enriched using an adaptive multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) algorithm and 1+1EA-Nelder–Mead simplex search algorithm. To compare the performance of the hybrid model to previous models, a comprehensive comparative deep learning framework was developed consisting of five modern machine learning algorithms, three stacked recurrent neural networks, 13 hybrid convolutional (CNN) recurrent deep learning models, and five evolutionary CNN recurrent models. The developed forecasting model was trained and validated using real meteorological and Shortwave Radiation (SRAD1) data from an installed offshore buoy station located in Lake Michigan, Chicago, United States, supported by the National Data Buoy Centre (NDBC). As a part of pre-processing, we applied an autoencoder to detect the outliers in improving the accuracy of solar radiation prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that, firstly, the hybrid deep residual learning model performed best compared with other machine learning and hybrid deep learning methods. Secondly, a cooperative architecture of gated recurrent units (GRU) and long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent models can enhance the performance of Xception and ResNet. Finally, using an effective evolutionary hyper-parameters tuner (ADCMA) reinforces the prediction accuracy of solar radiation.