Determination of the positive weather year for application in hygrothermal simulations

Abstract

Quite a few methods for the determination of characteristic weather years is available in the scientific literature. However, the positive weather year as opposed to the critical weather year is practically unheeded, although the alternation of positive and critical weather years in the service life prediction analyses may significantly increase the reliability of those simulations. In this paper, a simplified approach for the selection of the positive weather year for hygrothermal analyses in the Czech Republic is presented. This approach is designed for the locations with incomplete weather data sets. The lack of weather data is handled by replacing the missing data by Test Reference Years (TRY) from different locations with similar climate. After that, each weather year is ranked by the damage function and an inverse relationship between the damage function value and the respective weather year is found. Finally, several historical weather years in the Czech Republic are selected as the candidates for the positive year and the method is verified by a comparison with TRY.