Re: [EnergyPlus_Support] Re: Calibration with AMY weather data

Joe,

This may be slightly off topic. You might be using both sources, but I was wondering why one might choose Weather Underground vs. NOAA's Global Hourly dataset (Integrated Surface Hourly (ISH) / Integrated Surface Daily (ISD)).

I haven't created EPW weather files for AMY yet, but I'm wondering whether you might prefer Weather Uunderground:
- For ease of use: ISH seems to have multiple readings per hour at times, so it would require some more data processing. Also you need to fetch it annually via FTP, unzip, process, etc. whereas the scrapping off weather underground seems easier.
- Numbers of available station: this could definitely be one of the prime reasons
- Because ISH/ISD doesn't have the required parameters for EPW creation. I believe all parameters are there but I could be wrong.

Any light you can shed will be greatly appreciated.

Best,
Julien

--
Julien Marrec, EBCP, BPI MFBA
Energy&Sustainability Engineer
T: +33 6 95 14 42 13

LinkedIn (en) : www.linkedin.com/in/julienmarrec
LinkedIn (fr) : www.linkedin.com/in/julienmarrec/fr

2014-08-07 21:08 GMT+02:00 Joe Huang YJHuang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [EnergyPlus_Support] <EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Â
I'm heartened to see people utilizing Weather Underground as a source of real-time weather data.

I've had good luck working with Weather Underground data for several years, and find its coverage and data availability rather astonishing: over 16,000 personal weather stations (mostly US), and links to 34,000 official weather stations around the world (26,000 US, 6,000 international).Â Â If anyone's interested in real-time data at the local level, this would be a prime source to check.

However, I do want to mention some cautionsÂ in using WUnderground data. None of these are "showstoppers" but they will require work in data processing:
Â 1. data are in standard METAR format
Â 2. period of record may not go beyond the last 2-3 years.
Â 3.Â occasional data gaps
Â 4. (the biggie) no cloud cover data to estimate solar radiation (my solution has been to "borrow" cloud cover data from the nearest official weather station)

As far as downloading the data, I've been using python scripts written by Ery Djunaedy of the IDL at Univ. of Idaho building on previously posted work
at http://flowingdata.com/2007/07/09/grabbing-weather-underground-data-with-beautifulsoup/ .Â The scripts have worked like a charm, allowing me to download all available data for a site at one shot.

Joe
Joe Huang
White Box Technologies, Inc.
346 Rheem Blvd., Suite 108D
Moraga CA 94556
yjhuang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://weather.whiteboxtechnologies.com for simulation-ready weather data
(o) (925)388-0265
(c) (510)928-2683
"building energy simulations at your fingertips"
On 8/7/2014 7:51 AM, Jamie Bull jamiebull1@xxxxxxxxx [EnergyPlus_Support] wrote:
Â

And this Python snippet since downloading a day at a time is quite a headache.
http://oco-carbon.com/coding/wunderground-data-to-csv/

On 7 August 2014 15:02, chiso_es@xxxxxxxx [EnergyPlus_Support] <EnergyPlus_Support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Â

You can try this page.

http://www.wunderground.com/

Available data METAR (Meteorological Aerodrome Report)