Development of Chinese Weather Data for Building Energy Calculations

To support the development of building energy standards in China, the authors have recently developed a set of Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) weather data for 26 locations. These TMY weather data have been produced from 16 years of historical weather (1982-1997) reported by Chinese airports and recorded by the U.S. Climatic Data Service. Since the weather data records only cloud conditions at various heights, a substantial effort was made towards estimating the total and direct solar radiation from the cloud information, combined with information on temperature, humidity, and wind speed. Comparisons of the estimated solar to actual measured hourly solar for three locations and daily totals for all 26 locations showed good agreement to with 20% for hourly and 10% for daily values. The 26 weather files are available as either ASCII files in SI units, or as packed DOE-2.1E weather files.