Climate One Building Weather Files Updated Through 2021

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I don’t think Dru and Linda have accounts here so thought it would be good to share.

(from Dru’s LinkedIn Post)

Updated Global Simulation Climate Data Set Available from Climate.OneBuilding.Org

In April 2022, Climate.OneBuilding (climate.onebuilding.org) posted a completely updated worldwide TMYx data set adding more than 2500 new locations (>15% increase), bringing the total to more than 16,100 locations. These include weather station meteorology data through 2021 and corresponding solar radiation from the ERA5 reanalysis data set (ERA5 | ECMWF). The ERA5 data, courtesy of Oikolab (oikolab.com/), provides a comprehensive, worldwide gridded solar radiation data set based on satellite data. The new data (and all other weather files on the site including the 2004-2018 TMYx) also now include the latest ASHRAE 2021 design conditions.

The TMYx are derived from hourly weather station meteorology data through 2021 in the ISD (US NOAA/NCEI’s Integrated Surface Database) and gridded solar radiation data from ERA5 reanalysis using the TMY2/ISO 15927-4:2005 methodologies. Often, there are two TMYx for a location, e.g., for Washington Dulles Intl AP: USA_VA_Dulles-Washington.Dulles.Intl.AP.724030_TMYx and USA_VA_Dulles-Washington.Dulles.Intl.AP.724030_TMYx.2007-2021. In these cases, there’s a TMY for the entire period of record and a second TMY for the most recent 15 years (2007-2021). Not all locations have recent data.

With this update, Climate.OneBuilding.org now provides TMYx climate data at no cost for more than 16,100 locations in more than 195 countries and another 5,200 files from other data sources. All data have been through extensive quality checking to identify and correct data errors and out of normal range values where appropriate.

Each climate location .zip contains: EPW (EnergyPlus weather format energyplus.net/), CLM (ESP-r weather format ESP-r | University of Strathclyde), WEA (Daysim weather format Software | MIT Sustainable Design Lab), and PVSyst (NEW! PV solar design weather format – www.pvsyst.com/) along with DDY (updated ASHRAE 2021 design conditions in EnergyPlus format), RAIN (hourly precipitation in mm, where available), and STAT (expanded EnergyPlus weather statistics).

#data #solar #weatherdata #buildingsimulation #energysimulation

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Thanks for posting this @josephyang .

It’s big news, indeed! I’m particularly excited about all of the locations having ASHRAE 2021 design conditions. This is going to make it much easier for engineers to use E+ for HVAC sizing and peak load calculation.

We’ll have to update EPWmap with these new files soon but, in the meantime, everyone can get them from http://climate.onebuilding.org/.

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Thanks for pinning the post!

Also tagging @SaeranVasanthakumar

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@josephyang, thanks for tagging me, I’ve been waiting for this release for a while!

I still need to dedicate some time to reading the update, but I just want to say kudos to you and Dru/Linda for getting us TMYs aligned with state-of-art weather representation. This will be a huge asset to the building performance community.

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Hi All -

Given TMYx now has 15+ years of data, does anyone know why NREL/DOE has not updated EnergyPlus website to include TMYx and recommend it over TMY3?

Is there a quality of data concern with using TMYx vs TMY3?

I run across many energy modelers that use TMY3 data because that’s what is referenced in EnergyPlus documention. TMYx is not listed or available here:
https://energyplus.net/weather/sources

Best,
Victor

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Also, 90.1 and IECC don’t require you to use a specific TMY file, rather they have language for “AHJ approved” 8760 file. Does anyone know of a standard/code that requires/recommends certain weather file e.g., TMYx over TMY3?

Is anyone still using TMY3 over TMYx? Would like to know their reason.

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I won’t pretend that I know the exact answer but I would guess that the reason for this:

Is just that government-supported projects often change slowly and typically make changes in response to the concerns raised by stakeholders. For a lot of E+ users in the US, the TMY3 data has been “good enough” so there hasn’t been a lot of urgency to do something as tedious as updating all of the E+ docs.

But my understanding about this:

Is that the TMYx is generally a high-quality data set and few if any people would critique you for using it. Particularly because there are more TMYx files than TMY3 ones, I think most people would say it’s better to use a TMYx file for a location that is closer to your building site or has a similar elevation above sea level rather than using a TMY3 file from much further away.

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Thanks Chris.

Great points! Additionally, in that case, I think it makes sense to use the TMYx that accounts for the latest 15 year period only rather than the longer term TMYx. I’m not sure of use case for that.

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For the few that may critique use of TMYx, are you aware of what they would say/ downside to using the TMYx data?

From what I understand TMYx were generated using same methods as TMY3, but with improved solar radiation data especially for for non-US locations.

As an example, for a project where the closest weather station has both TMY3 and TMYx, I’m curious if community has generally migrated to using TMYx?

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There is a pretty good webninar that might help answer some of your questions, where Dru Crawley, who runs Climate One Building, discusses some aspects of these: ‘Weather Data in Building Performance Modelling’ which you can find here:

https://designbuilder.co.uk/training/webinars

I think there is still general preference for weather station data as ‘measured’ vs re-analysis data as ‘modelled’ data so I’ll leave this as food for thought. :slight_smile:

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Source: https://www.dwd.de/DWD/forschung/nwv/fepub/icon_database_main.pdf

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