The Rough Guide to Meteonorm

Meteonorm is a tool which will generate climate data for almost anywhere in the world. It uses a combination of measured data along with models of solar geometry and climate types to produce a range of climate data to be used as input to building models*. The final product from the tool is an Ascii text file containing columns of the data you have requested. This can be manipulated by a spreadsheet package (eg Excel) or text editor (eg Notepad) or Wordprocessing software (eg Word). Data may be provided at hourly intervals (for dynamic simulation programs) or averaged over a month. The following data is available for hourly output. A logical subset of this is available for monthly output.

Year

Day of Year

Month

Day of the month

Hour

Hour of the year

Local Time

Radiation balance

Solar Azimuth

Emissivity, vertical plane

Height of sun i.e. altitude

Emissivity, horizontal plane

Longwave radiation, vertical plane

Longwave radiation, incoming

Global radiation horizontal

Diffuse radiation horizontal

Diffuse radiation, tilted plane

Global luminance

Diffuse luminance

Global radiation, tilted plane

Beam

Heating Degree-days 12/20 (monthly)

Cloud Cover Fraction

Dewpoint Temperature

Wet bulb temperature

Air Temperature

Relative Humidity

Air pressure

Wind direction

Wind Speed/Air speed

Many of the outputs are available in various SI and Imperial units. Whilst this is a fairly extensive set of data, an understanding of the relationship between different parameters will enable you to generate other parameters. A spreadsheet package will be useful for this.

Using Meteonorm

Meteonorm runs in Windows 98, 95 or NT. At the time of writing, it is not installed on the Network. If you are running it from the network then this will probably be an upgrade to Edition 97 and may differ in its usage.

There is a comprehensive manual for Meteonorm available in electronic or paper form.

Typical Sequence

Create an area (sub-directory) to store your results before using for 1st time. Note bold instructions below refer to menu entries or buttons.

From main menu/icons:

First choose your Site.

From the dialogue box which appears you can choose either measured data by selecting the Stations button or calculated data by selecting the Cities button. Note that even when choosing stations, not all the data generated will be measured data. This brings up a further dialogue box in which you can choose the 'part of the world' for which you require data. After choosing your 'part of the world', type in the first letter of your city in front of the *, alongside the box marked Search site: Click on the city when it appears in the list alongside and OK. Or you can choose visually by clicking on Map, then zoom (select and drag the region you are interested in). Click identify and the location corresponding to the 'cross-hairs' will be verified when you select one of the squares. Select OK when complete. This returns you to the main screen.

If Radiation data on a non-horizontal plane is required, choose Plane orient.

Select Format then User-defined. The Red list is those parameters currently selected for output, the others represent those also available. Double-click on any parameter to move it from or to the list. Use the arrow buttons to place it in the required position.

Select Units(User defined) (click on relevent units and then OK). OK the Userdefined Output to return to the main menu. It is generally adviseable to include Month, Day of Month, and Hour if you need to make any analysis or modifications to the data.

Select Hourly values. The program will now execute. Wait a minute or so for processing.

Select pull-down menu File->Save->Hourly Values and save to nominated directory

You cannot view the monthly data on screen, you will have to load the above named file into other manipulation software such as Excel, Notepad or Word in order to view it.

*Where available, the use of measured climate data is usually recommended.

Climate Data format for Apache

APACHE does not take ASCII formatted climate data, it has to be processed by IES to their own format. However IES need the data in some form in order to convert it into that form required for Apache. The following is the IES recommended format:

Andrew Bairstow, January 2002