Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
I think it's much more preferable to build a new weather file than to splice limited data into an existing weather file, since there would be no correspondence between the two types of data. After all, solar radiation is highly correlated to other climatic factors, so if you merge solar from one place in time to temperature, humidity, etc. for another place at a different time, I'm really not sure how much improvement you're getting, or maybe even making it worse ?
The irony of the situation is that actual historical weather data is much more plentiful than "typical year" weather data, which requires at least 8 years up to 25 years of historical data to make. For example, the NCDC maintains a running data base called the Integrated Surface Hourly (ISD) that has the weather reports for over 20,000 (8,000 usable) weather stations around the world that, for the US, lag real time by just a couple of days. Furthermore, web sources like the WeatherUnderground opens up the possibility of over 30,000 stations just in the US. The problem, of course, is that these are raw data, and needs to be processed at least twice - once to clean up the data and add the solar radiation - and then again to convert to formats recognizable by simulation programs.
