Meteonorm 7.0-aided generation of synthetic metrological year used in energy simulation, for climatic regions of Saudi Arabia

Abstract EN

Energy simulation and modeling in buildings require annual hourly weather data.

The accuracy and completeness of the data is vital to assess the 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.

To overcome these shortcomings, weather generation models have been developed in the US and Europe and can be utilized for Saudi Arabian climates.

These models use available weather statistical summaries to synthetically generate year-long hourly data as required by energy simulation models format.

Some models generate weather data for remote locations from weather stations by interpolation techniques.

Saudi Arabia can be classified into five climatic regions, representing Central, Upland, Northern, Western, and Eastern regions, and the present work was aimed at synthetically generating weather data for these regions by using METEONORM 7.0 (MN7).

The data generated by MN7 was compared with those obtained from the national Presidency of Meteorology and Environment (PME), and found in acceptable agreement with each other.

It was also observed that, in many cases the MN7 data need proper scrutiny and rectification in order to be consistent with the long-term PME data.