Micro-scale weather data for energy performance assessment in Singapore

Abstract

Weather data plays an important role for energy perfor- mance assessment in the design of buildings and urban environments. Many researches have been carried out to generate and analyse vari- ous weather files for different simulation platforms. However, investi- gations have been lacking in the development of weather files that ac- count for urban heat island (UHI) problems. As a result of global warming and the complexity of the urban environment, the weather file for a modern city cannot be simply based on climate information from 20 years ago. The objective of this research is to demonstrate a method for creating different micro-scale typical meteorological year (TMY) weather files based on different urban texture values. This re- search includes three steps: 1) Recent years weather data is obtained. 2) Considering the UHI impact, a series of new TMY weather files are generated for different micro-scale areas in Singapore based on rele- vant urban texture variables. 3) A comparison of the results shows that there is a big difference between the new and the old TMY. The tem- perature of the new TMY is 1-2°C higher, while the solar radiation is lower than the original TMY data. Hence the new weather files will be more credible than the original TMY for energy performance simula- tion in the design process.