Hygrothermal climate analysis: An Australian dataset

Abstract

Transient hygrothermal assessments rely on the definition of external climatic conditions, usually collected in a moisture reference year (MRY) file. Currently, hygrothermal climate files for Australia are not available, leaving researchers and practitioners to either use typical meteorological years (TMY) files, generated for thermal analysis, or other propriety datasets that are not unified, standardized or shared, hence hindering reproducibility of studies and comparative analysis. This dataset provides a comprehensive suite of climatic files ready to be used in hygrothermal simulations, as well as general climate data that could serve as a basis for further analysis. The dataset can be used to create a hygrothermal map, as presented in Javed et al. (2022) or directly employed in building simulations.This dataset contains two different types of data that can be employed for transient hygrothermal analysis: MRYs for 30 locations across Australia completed with the climatic data necessary to generate the file, and 10 consecutive years of hourly climate parameters for Brisbane, Cairns, Melbourne, Darwin, Hobart, Sydney, and Canberra cities, representing those locations where most of the population live. These two types of data provide the input for hygrothermal assessment as defined by the ASHRAE 160-2016. Raw climate data were extracted from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology database and the NOAA's National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration database to generate a complete hourly dataset. Additionally, for the first type of data, 30 consecutive years of climate data have been analysed following the moisture index method by calculating the wetting and drying indices. The resulting yearly moisture indexes were ranked from highest to lowest and the MRY was selected as the 10th-percentile year, considered to be the most representative year for severe moisture stress on a building envelope.