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

National sources

Weather data editor/translator