Rethinking the TMY: is the ‘Typical’ Meteorological Year Best for Building Performance Simulation?

Historically, building simulation users have used a single typical year or a constructed typical meteorological year to represent climatic conditions for a location or region. With advent of increasingly powerful computers, it is no longer necessary to represent climatic conditions with a single year of data. Prior studies have shown that a single year of data often do not well represent the range of climate conditions over a period. This paper proposes a new regime for climatic data representation in buildings—an XMY or eXtreme Meteorological Year—building on a paper from Building Simulation 1999 that called for a common format for building simulation representation. We demonstrate how several sets of international typical meteorological data sets compare to the actual period of record that they represent. Then using an example prototype building, we show that the climatic response of the building would be better served by a range of building climatic data, investigating high and low cases of temperature, humidity, solar radiation and wind conditions.