ESP-r: Climate

Current capabilities

A master list of available climate data sets is held in a file named climate/climatelist in the source distribution and is installed by default in /usr/esru/esp-r/climate/climatelist. This master list supports groups of climates, and each entry in the climate list records the location of the file, whether it is on-line or off-line, defintions of the start and end of 5 seasons (1st winter, spring, summer, autumn, 2nd winter in the northern hemisphere) as well as a definition of a typical week in each season.
Climate data is held hourly for: diffuse solar on the horizontal, dry bulb temperature, director normal (or global horizontal) solar, wind speed, wind direction andrelative humidity.
Climate data is typically held in a binary file for use by the simulator. The source distribution includes several dozen climate files held in ASCII format. Such files are created and maintained by the clm module.
Climate data associated with a model can correspond to a higher frequency (up to one minute) via the use of a temporal file. Such files are created and maintained by the tdf module.
The clm module provides facilities to:
- convert between ASCII and binary versions of the ESP-r climate file;
- import EnergyPlus climate files from the US Department of Energy;.
- scan climate data to determine the week with the least divergence from each season based on heating/cooling degree days and solar patterns; and
- perform statistical analyses.

Climate data is used at simulation time as the problem boundary condition.

Primary routines

esruclm/clm.F - climate control module
esrucom/rcdblist.F - scans climatelist file

Primary variables

COMMON/typper - typical seasonal assessment periods
COMMON/typsea - start and end of each season
COMMON/clmdat - array of climate data for one 24 hr period.

Issues arising

The climate data associated with ESP-r has been static for some years and the advent of the EPW file format offers the possibility to expand the data types (e.g. atmospheric pressure, cloud types.)

Climate files are for a calendar year which is somewhat irritating for assessments of winter performance in that an assessment from november to march requires two simulations.