Accurate weather data is a crucial ingredient for building energy, comfort, and daylighting simulations. It provides the essential environmental information needed to drive these calculations, ensuring reliable and realistic results. That’s where DesignBuilder Climate Analytics steps in – a powerful tool designed specifically to meet the needs of building energy modellers.
This platform offers a vast database of high-quality hourly weather data, along with advanced analysis tools to help you choose the perfect data for your project. By providing access to best-practice weather data selection tools, DesignBuilder Climate Analytics gives you complete confidence in the climatic inputs for your building performance simulations.
A Comprehensive Suite of Weather Data and Analysis Tools
DesignBuilder Climate Analytics delivers a comprehensive suite of global weather data and analysis tools for your building performance simulations.
- Access hourly weather data for any site worldwide through an easy-to-use web page.
- Get access to accurately measured data from over 43,000 weather stations and gridded satellite data measurements from 1970 to present day.
- Use intuitive graphical selection tools to analyze the climate and choose the most appropriate design data for your projects based on a wide range of criteria.
- Customise design weather data to your exact requirements. You can override measured data with design values and/or offsets for temperature, sky type, wind, and other factors.
- Download data in the widely used EnergyPlus EPW file format, making it seamlessly compatible with your existing workflow.
- Benefit from monthly updates, ensuring you always have access to the latest Actual Year data.
- Access weather data libraries from Climate.OneBuilding, White Box Technologies, and EnergyPlus through the Climate Analytics graphical interface.
Data Types: Design Years, Actual Years, and Typical Years
The available weather data types can be broadly categorized into Design Years, Actual Years, and Typical Years. Each type serves a specific purpose and provides a different level of detail and accuracy.
Free and Paid Access Options
While most features of DesignBuilder Climate Analytics require a paid licence, you can still access limited functionality with a free licence through our map interface. This allows you to:
- Explore the Climate.OneBuilding library of typical year TMYx weather data for 17,476 locations in over 195 countries. This library is generously provided free of charge by Dru Crawley and Linda Lawrie, creators of the EPW file format.
- Access the library of 2,458 typical year weather files provided free of charge by EnergyPlus.
- Use the White Box Technologies library of Typical year and Actual year weather data developed by Joe Huang with 13,946 stations. However, accessing the data itself requires a separate fee and is not included with Climate Analytics licences.
Behind the Scenes: Data Sources and Quality Control
The core of DesignBuilder Climate Analytics dataset is built upon the Integrated Surface Database (ISD). This database brings together global synoptic daily observations from numerous sources, unifying them into a single common format and data model. To ensure the highest quality, the data held in the ISD undergoes rigorous quality control using extensive algorithms. These algorithms check for data validity, extreme values, internal consistency, and consistency with other observations from the same station.
Understanding Design Year and Actual Year Data
Design Year data is created by combining measured daily minimum/maximum temperature, humidity, and wind speed data from stations with gridded data. Behind the scenes, these daily values are used to generate the hourly variations in solar radiation, temperature, wind, and other factors for each day, providing the essential hourly weather files for your simulations.
Actual Year data is obtained directly from a dense grid of values sourced from NASA’s MERRA2 reanalysis data. This grid has a spatial resolution of 0.5° latitude x 0.625° longitude with 72 pressure levels. Actual year data offers significantly higher temporal resolution compared to design data.
For a deeper dive into the data sources and quality assurance processes behind DesignBuilder Climate Analytics, visit our informative Climate Analytics Data Sources and Quality help page.
