Establish high-resolution hourly weather data for simulating building energy consumption in different regions

Due to the various local weather conditions in different regions of the city, the demand for air conditioning (AC) of housing is different, too. It happened occasionally to underestimate the energy consumption of AC in urban areas, because of using suburban/rural weather station data for building energy simulation. This study set up 34 automatic weather stations in the urban area of Tainan City, Taiwan for a year-round collection of local temperature and relative humidity data. Those weather measurement, the GIS information of a buffer zone and multiple regression analysis were used to establish the relationship between the weather factors, needed for the morphing approach, and the parameters of landscape use and cover. The buffer zone is an area of 1000×1000 m² around the measured point, and is divided to two layers with upwind and downwind parts. Local hourly weather-year files for a whole of the city with a resolution of 200×200 m² were generated by the morphing approach. With the different local hourly weather-year files, the AC-required hours and energy consumption from May to October for a typical residential with hybrid ventilation mode was obtained by using the EnergyPlus. And the cumulative UHI of each grid between May and October is calculated by taking the average of the five lowest temperatures as the reference value. The result shows that the number of AC hours of residential will increase by 10%, and the energy consumption increase from 1000 kWh to 2500 kWh, when long-term UHI intensity increases from 2000 °C-hour to 9000 °C-hour.