Normalization of synthetically generated weather data (synthetic metrological year) of typical climatic zones of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Energy simulation and modeling in buildings require annual hourly weather data. The accuracy and completeness of the data are vital to assess annual energy performance of building and to evaluate alternative building design strategies. Weather stations in Saudi Arabia conduct and archive weather data measurements for major cities and Airbases. However, these data are summaries or incomplete and in varying formats. In the first part of the present work, weather data were synthetically generated (Synthetic Metrological Year) by using METEONORM 7.0 (MN7), for the cities such as Riyadh, Jeddah, Dhahran, Tabuk, and Khamis, which represent Central, Upland, Northern, Western, and Eastern regions of Saudi Arabia. The weather parameters measured were dry bulb temperature (Ta), global solar radiation (Gh), relative humidity, and wind speed. The MN7 data were compared with the corresponding national Presidency of Meteorology and Environment (PME) data, and observed that in many cases the MN7 data needed proper scrutiny and rectification in order to maintain conformity with the actual data. Therefore, a Microsoft Excel-based normalization procedure was applied to make the MN7 data consistent with the corresponding PME data. It was found that the proposed normalization technique could rectify all the discrepancies of MN7 data and bring them excellently close to the PME data.