Climate data resource page

25 March 2019 by Jason Quinn

For Passive House calculations members of iPHA can use their tool to generate files for PHPP An indicative climate file can be generated here with this tool. Remember that the file is defined for the northern hemisphere and must be altered using the Climate data tool for the Southern Hemisphere.

Hourly weather files for use in EnergyPlus or other transient tools are available at OneBuilding.org Australian files are available at this page. For both NZ and Australia there are now TMYx files available. Per Drew Crawley ” TMYx are typical meteorological year data derived from hourly weather data through 2017 in the ISD (US NOAA’s Integrated Surface Database) using the TMY2/ISO 15927-4:2005 methodologies. There may be two TMYxs for a location, e.g., Luxembourg AP, Luxembourg:  LUX_LU_Luxembourg.AP.065900_TMYx.epw and LUX_LU_Luxembourg.AP.065900_TMYx.2003-2017.epw. In these cases, there’s a TMY for the entire period of record and a second TMY for the most recent 15 years (2003-2017). Not all locations have recent data. 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), CLM (ESP-r weather format), and WEA (Daysim weather format) along with DDY (ASHRAE design conditions in EnergyPlus format), RAIN (hourly precipitation in mm, where available), and STAT (expanded EnergyPlus weather statistics).”

 

Australian building code energy zones are the first step to deciding which file is appropriate for your site. NATHERS site.

ASHRAE weather site with design data for much of the world including NZ and AU plus many pacific islands.

Historical datasets from NOAA are available at this site.

For New Zealand the most complete set available is NIWA’s National Climate Database at CliFlo you need to subscribe but the data online is free. CliFlo is the web system that provides access to New Zealand’s National Climate Database which starts with the earliest data from 1850 and has about 6,500 stations in total. For data geeks there is an extension which allows extracting data easier call CliFro. We were going to complain that
unfortunately the different organizations inside NZ started not sharing data after ~2012? so it is hard to get current data. But I just checked and was able to download all of 2018 from the Kelburn, Wellington AWS station so that may have been ‘fixed’. Grateful if that is the case.

 

For hourly or sub-hourly future weather file morphing we use Meteonorm in-house but if you just want one future Energy Plus weather file morphed you can use WeatherShift.com  The graphic view (which is free) can be used to set the temperature to use with the PHPP morphing tool (which is free as well).

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