FORECAST UPDATES: [Weather & Solar Post-processing]
Ensemble scenarios for buildings applications produced using weather forecast data from model integrations
After being extremely involved in writing different chapters of the book titled “Intelligent design using solar‐climatic vision” in collaboration with TU-Berlin and the Young Cities Research project, I am now in a good mood for programming : )
Many codes have been developed quite recently and are almost ready to be shared here; however, some time is needed first to hopefully have your feedback regarding the book especially if you are an urban planner or someone who studied architecture like me.
If you are an environmental researcher/building engineer/architect/landscape architect/urban designer/administrator/client or even a building & city dweller; and if you have deep environmental concerns and you have not been yet completely satisfied with the manner in which buildings and cities have developed around you, then here is probably be the right place for you.
To improve the quality of our local built up environment and to create/maintain good qualities on a number of scales that were discussed on the SOLARCHVISION home page, you will hopefully appreciate a unique user-friendly platform purposely designed as part of the recently updated SOLARCHVISION-2014.
As is also discussed on this web site’s home page, Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) Climate Files, often used by the building simulation community and which include hourly information for a whole year, are specifically appropriate for General Energy Simulations and have often been widely applied by different and popular Building Simulations Tools for quite a while.
However, the SOLARCHVISION-2014 tool now provides you with an even greater number of processing and post-processing options using larger and more comprehensive datasets. For example, now for a location you can consider 50 years of recorded data. And there’s more! Accessing and applying multi-layers of data is now available and could be used in various decision-making processes that could be appropriated for a variety of purposes. For a good introduction to this concept, you can read “Weather Forecast Data an Important Input into Building Management Systems”, ICEBO-2013 which is available via the following line: http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/cmc/cmoi/product_guide/docs/REFcsts/
Using the updated version of SOLARCHVISION-2014 which will be available soon, you will be able to easily appreciate how to simulate and study the impacts of the long-term hourly historical datasets (e.g. CWEEDS: Canadian Weather Energy and Engineering Datasets). Additionally SOLARCHVISION-2014 can now also generate probabilistic type forecasts from real time ensemble weather forecast data to allow the user to study real time scenarios of interest.
Besides statistical & probabilistic studies on the data in different time periods, SOLARCHVISION-2014 now enables you to study the trends within many different weather parameters, including but not limited to air temperature & pressure, relative humidity, wind speed & direction. Additionally, trends can even be refined further by including the study of trends in certain particular weather conditions for example when the sky is clear, or overcast. The approach used by the SOLARCHVISION algorithms in the study of solar patterns and influences have now been able to be extended to help appreciate and study a variety of solar/environmental impacts.
In addition to all the great benefits the sun can provide when the sun is considered as part of the design optimizations and control/management of solar energy applications and systems i.e. improving comfort, health and safety factors inside and outside buildings, SOLARCHVISION-2014 will hopefully stimulate a wider range of renewable energy considerations along with the ability to target, study, control and manage even more specific impacts of interest to sustainable buildings and cities.
Below are some examples of images produced using SOLARCHVISION-2014. These diagrams were produced using weather forecast data made available by the Canadian Meteorological Center (CMC) for the CYUL weather observation stations located in Dorval, Quebec, on the island of Montreal.
The plots below include 21 members from Environment Canada’s Global Ensemble Prediction System (GEPS) and 1 member from the Environment Canada’s Global Deterministic Prediction System (GDPS member #22). In addition they also contain 21 NCEP members numbered as Members 23-43.
It must be noted here that the xml data files made available by CMC do not presently contain forecast data of solar flux though such forecasts may be made available at a later date. In some diagrams below solar direct and diffuse components were derived using a SOLARCHVISION post-processing algorithm applied to the available data for each of the 43 forecast members. Also note that even though the original CMC GEPS forecast data is made available at 6hour interval, SOLARCHVISION again was able to appropriately interpolate and infer hourly forecasts from this data using a Smooth Selection/Filter Function to find out similar conditions of that date & hour, namely Cloud cover & Air pressure, within the long term hourly climate file in WY2 format (CWEEDS).
The author intends to frequently update the information on this website using the real time weather forecast data that is made available by Environment Canada in order to demonstrate on an ongoing basis some examples of producing a wide range of probabilistic/scenario forecasts.
NAEFS (North American Ensemble Forecast System) locations in Canada
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