Understanding the reliability of localized near future weather data for building performance prediction in the UK

Abstract

Abstract-Access to reliable site-specific near future weather data is crucial for forecasting temporally-dynamic building energy demand and consumption, and determining the state of on-site renewable energy generation. Often there is a missing link between weather forecast providers and building energy management systems. This short paper discusses the potential to conduct building performance modelling using localized high resolution weather forecast freely available from the United Kingdom Met Office DataPoint service. It creates a great opportunity for building performance simulation professionals and building energy managers to re-use site-specific high resolution weather forecast data to predict near future building performance at both individual building and city scale. In this paper, authors have developed a framework of forecasting near future building performance and a Matlab script to automatically gather observed weather data from 140 weather stations and weather forecasts for nearly 6,000 locations in the UK. To understand the reliability of weather forecast, threehourly forecasts of temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and wind direction are compared with observations from weather stations. This provides evidences to use the next 24-hour forecast to predict dynamic building energy demand and consumption, and determine the on-site renewable energy generation output. Because of the high accuracy of forecast, the rolling forecast can be recorded on daily basis to construct weather files for locations that do not have weather stations. This will increase current 14 locations of the CIBSE weather data to nearly 6,000 locations covering population centers, sporting venues and tourist attractions.

Methodology for the Quantification of the Impact of Weather Forecasts in Predictive Simulation Models

“…For the forecast weather files, the data is obtained using the methodology presented by the authors in [26][27][28]. This methodology, based on the free online toolchain, develops a REST API for users that obtains site-specific near-future forecast weather data in EPW format from cost-free access providers.…”

“…Nowadays, there are many established weather forecast services providers that have made some of their data freely available through APIs (Application Programming Interface). The reason why this data is not usually used is that often there is a missing link between the weather forecast provider and the building energy management system [26]. Previous research from authors [26][27][28] demonstrated a novel approach that develops a Representational State Transfer (REST) API for users to obtain site-specific historical and near-future weather forecast data in Energy Plus Weather File (EPW) format for building simulation using the free online toolchain.…”

Generating High Resolution Near-Future Weather Forecasts for Urban Scale Building Performance Modelling

“…Authors' previous studies (Du et al, 2016b, Du et al, 2016a have compared the forecasts with observation for London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast independently to the institute making the forecasts. The results show that the next 24-hour forecast temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and wind direction are very close to observations, often less than 1 o C difference in temperature, 5% difference in relative humidity, 1.5m/s difference in wind speed and 25 degree difference in wind direction.…”

Study on the influence of voids on high-rise building on the wind environment

“…Pedestrian wind security and comfort are crucial requirements for a city (Moonen et al 2012). Taking consideration of its importance, many governmental institutions released new building policy in according with airflow safety and comfort evaluation researches, which could improve surrounding comfort and safety (Du et al 2012(Du et al , 2016.…”