Abstract
We present a method to generate Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data sets for use in calculations of the energy performance of buildings, based on satellite derived solar radiation data and other meteorological parameters obtained from reanalysis products. The great advantage of this method is the availability of data over large geographical regions, giving global coverage for the reanalysis and continental-scale coverage for the solar radiation data, making it possible to generate TMY data for nearly any location, independent of the availability of meteorological measurement stations in the area. The TMY data generated with this method have been validated against 487 meteorological stations in Europe, by calculating heating and cooling degree days, and by running building energy performance simulations using EnergyPlus. Results show that the generated data sets using a long time series perform better than the TMY data generated from station measurements for building heating calculations and nearly as well for cooling calculations, with relative standard deviations remaining below 6% for heating calculations. TMY data constructed using the proposed method yield somewhat larger deviations compared to TMY data constructed from station data. We outline a number of possibilities for further improvement using data sets that will become available in the near future.
Highlights
Climatic data are essential in order to calculate the heating or cooling requirements of new or refurbished buildings
NASA’s MERRA-2 [15] reanalysis uses a spatial resolution of 0.5◦ × 0.66◦. These data sets contain all the usual climatic parameters measured at meteorological stations and in addition a large number of parameters, including incoming solar radiation and downwelling thermal infrared radiation, which are useful for building energy performance studies
The main aim of the validation is to compare the Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data sets generated with the ground station data against those made with the reanalysis data
Summary
Climatic data are essential in order to calculate the heating or cooling requirements of new or refurbished buildings. Using images from geostationary satellites, these data sets provide solar radiation values with a spatial resolution of a few km and hourly temporal resolution (sometimes even higher) In this way, solar radiation data are available at any location over large geographical areas for long time periods (up to 30 years at present in some areas [12]). NASA’s MERRA-2 [15] reanalysis uses a spatial resolution of 0.5◦ × 0.66◦ These data sets contain all the usual climatic parameters measured at meteorological stations and in addition a large number of parameters, including incoming solar radiation and downwelling thermal infrared radiation, which are useful for building energy performance studies. In the future, it will be possible to download a longer time series of the same climatic quantities
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