Near-extreme summer meteorological data set for sub-tropical climates

Abstract

Building performance simulation requires representative weather data of specific locations. Test Reference Year (TRY) and Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) are common hourly dataset for typical year conditions. In sub-tropical climates, overheating is very common in buildings due to high temperature and intense solar radiation. However, there are no universal approaches to develop a dataset for estimating summer discomfort in naturally ventilated and free-running buildings. This article employs the concept of Summer Reference Years (SRY) in order to represent the near-extreme summer conditions in Hong Kong. The derived SRY is able to capture the near-extreme conditions in the multi-year series. The SRY was found to represent the high Tdry values reasonably well during daytime when such near-extreme conditions occur. On the contrary, according to the number of HN-DHs, the SRY does not satisfactorily represent high night-time Tdry. It is possible to incorporate the sorting of Tdry-min in the SRY adjustment in order to better reflect night-time situations in sub-tropical climate. Further studies are therefore required to confirm whether such modifications give more accurate results in the assessment of building energy performance. Nonetheless, the SRY dataset can be applied in building performance simulation and the assessment of indoor thermal comfort. Practical application: The present study found that there are deficiencies for the SRY to represent the high night-time Tdry, which affects the building performance assessment in sub-tropical climates. It suggests potential improvement to the existing adjustment of SRY for representing the near-extreme summer conditions in order to obtain more accurate results of building assessment.