EnergyPlus Hourly Weather Data

All of the hourly weather data that comes with DesignBuilder is supplied by DOE from:

www.eere.energy.gov/buildings/energyplus/cfm/weather_data.cfm

But with the year changed to 2002 as described in Add new hourly weather data.

Many of these weather files are composite files from multiple years.  Each month has been selected to be representative of that month for the period of record.  Representative of the normal patterns for that month not the average.  The selection of months is usually based on a weighting of temperature, humidity, wind, and solar.  There are some variations among the weighting, most are similar to the TMY2 done in the US in the 1990s:  

http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/pubs/tmy2/

You can find the details of the file format in the AuxiliaryPrograms EnergyPlus document.

Sources of EnergyPlus Hourly Weather Data

Other sources of hourly weather data and associated tools are listed below.

International sources

• Meteonorm - a software application that can generate synthetic hourly weather data in epw format for a wide range of locations. See http://meteonorm.com/

• Weather analytics can provide weather data in epw format for a very wide range of locations on a very fine grid. They use algorithms to interpolate between measured data sets held taking into account local height above sea level and other factors. See: http://weatheranalytics.com/.

• Climate.OneBuilding - service established in 2015 as an unfunded project by Linda Lawrie and Dru Crawley. See: http://climate.onebuilding.org/
• EnergyPlus support are sometimes willing to provide weather data. They have a large stock of locations and can run Meteonorm to generate data. See: http://energyplus.helpserve.com/

National sources

• UK - CIBSE, TRY, DSY and future climate hourly weather data for . See: http://www.cibse.org/Knowledge/CIBSE-other-publications/CIBSE-Weather-Data-Current,-Future,-Combined-DSYs
• Germany - DWD, TRY 2010 weather data for Germany can be downloaded free of charge from the Europe page on the http://climate.onebuilding.org website.
• Australia and new Zealand - NATHers, Latest hourly weather data for Australia and New Zealand can be downloaded from NATHers at no cost. The link depends on your browser. Copy the links below into the address bar of your browser.
  • Internet Explorer: ftp://rNatHERS:MDkflWeZ@ftp.niwa.co.nz/ftp/NatHERS
  • Chrome/Firefox: ftp://rNatHERS:MDkflWeZ@ftp.niwa.co.nz

• Portugal - LNEG, Download a free spreadsheet which can generate hourly weather data for the various Portuguese regions. See: http://www.lneg.pt/servicos/328/2263/.

Weather data editor/translator

• Elements is a free, open-source, cross-platform software tool for creating and editing custom weather files for building energy modelling. See: http://bigladdersoftware.com/projects/elements/