Micro-scale weather data for energy performance assessment in Singapore

Abstract

Weather data plays an important role for energy performance assessment in the design of buildings and urban environments. Many researches have been carried out to generate and analyse various weather files for different simulation platforms. However, investigations have been lacking in the development of weather files that account 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 research 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 relevant urban texture variables. 3) A comparison of the results shows that there is a big difference between the new and the old TMY. The temperature 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 simulation in the design process.