Creating a high quality Ecotect weather file from Meteonorm
February 16th, 2010
One of the problems with the weather files that are bundled with Ecotect is that they are usually out-dated. Also, most of the weather stations are city airports which do not reflect the true weather conditions that might be prevailing on your site. This is the reason why it’s preferable to create your own weather file from Meteonorm or other similar software.
The advantage of using Meteonorm to create a better .wea file is that this software extrapolates weather data from the nearest weather stations from the location that you have provided and gives results relevant to the site of the project. Also, the data is created using 20-year measurement periods so there is very little variation from the current averages.
For this tutorial, I will be creating a weather file for area of Camden in London.
The first thing to note is what kind of data Ecotect Weather Tool can assimilate. The following list shows all data we need to create a high quality weather file:
Month of the year (1-12)
Day of the month (1-31)
Julian date (1-365)
Hour of the day (1-24)
Air temperature (Dry bulb °C)
Relative humidity (%)
Absolute humidity (g/kg)
Dew point temperature (°C)
Wet bulb temperature (°C)
Wind speed (khm/h)
Wind direction (degrees CW)
Global horizontal radiation (Wh/m2)
Diffuse horizontal radiation (Wh/m2)
Direct beam radiation (Wh/m2)
Cloudiness (%)
Rainfall (mm)
Arming yourself with this list, open Meteonorm.
Click on the ‘Site’ button to select the site. In the dialogue box that opens, make sure the hand icon is pointing at ‘Cities (Europe)’. Put ‘Camden’ in the search box and press the button next to it. There would be just one search result viz. ‘Camden UK’ as shown in the following figure:
Click ‘Camden UK’ and press OK.
Click the ‘Format’ button to open the ‘Output formats’ dialogue box as shown:
Choose ‘User defined’ and press OK to open the ‘Userdefined Output’ box. Select the options EXACTLY in the following order and as shown in the figure:
Month
Day of the month
Day of the year
Hour
Air temperature
Relative humidity
Mixing ratio
Dewpoint temperature
Wet bulb temperature
Wind speed
Wind direction
Global radiation horizontal
Diffuse radiation horizontal
Beam
Cloud cover fraction
Precipitation
As you would have already noticed, they are in the exact same order as Ecotect Weather Tool requires them to be. Make sure you UNTICK the header box.
Click on ‘Units (user defined)’ button and make sure it looks like the following figure:
Click OK to return to the main screen. Click ‘Hourly values’ button and wait for Meteonorm to process your data. It will show a green tick after it finishes.
Click ‘Save’ and save the .dat file to the desktop since it’s just a temporary file and we will delete it later.
Open Ecotect Weather Tool, go to the File menu and click ‘Open’ (or just press Ctrl+O).
Make sure the file type is selected as ‘Separated Value Files’ and open the .dat file you saved on the desktop.
The ‘Read Column Separated Hourly Data…’ box opens.
Add all the entries in the SAME order as shown by Ecotect.
Change the units of the following since that is how we exported it from Meteonorm:
Month of the Year – 1-12
Day of the Month – 1-31
Julian Date – 1-365
Hour of the Day – 1-24
Wind Speed – m/s
Cloudiness – Octas (1-8)
Click ‘Import File’ and the data shows up in the Ecotect Weather Tool’s window.
Change the longitude, latitude, time zone, altitude what was shown in Meteonorm.
Save the file in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Ecotect Analysis 2010\Weather Data\.
If you are running a 64-bit operating system, then the location would be C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\Ecotect Analysis 2010\Weather Data\
Restart Ecotect Weather Tool and your weather file would be visible in the Weather File Explorer on the right.
Please feel free to leave your comments below for any corrections/suggestions.
Tags: meteonorm, weather
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 2:43 AM.
Category: Ecotect, Tools.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
23 Responses to this post.
Leave a Reply
Thanks! This is one of the most common and important step.
I always use to mess up in the end while making weather files.
This is great!
Thanks for the tips!
I need to ask that in Meteonorm can i specify the year.for example if i need the hourly solar radiations for the year 2004, for 365 days.or from metenorm i can get only average hourly radiation data from 1991-2000?
i am little bit confused about this if any body can help please?
Ahmad
Thailand
Hi Ahamd,
As far as I know, it is not possible to get data of a particular year from Meteonom. Meteonorm is only useful for creating weather files in different formats.
We use Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com) for detailed weather history data for different locations.
Hope it helps!
[...] Read the full tutorial on the Sustainotect blog … [...]
Hi, I´m from Colombia, and i´m creating Medellin city, but I have a question…
When i was in the Meteonorm, i select "Medellin, CO", and there something that doesn´t match with the reality. The minimal altitude of Medellin is 1450mt, and a Maximun 1650mt and the meteonorm appears with a 2285mt….
Then reading the instructions with the Weather Tool of Ecotect, i have to type the altitude same as it was in the meteonorm, and that´s the problem cause i don´t want to make mistakes on the simulations.
So the quiestion is, Can I modify the altitude in the weather tool???
Why my city doesn´t match with the reality??
What is ur opinion?
Thanks for all…….
regards!
You can modify the altitude in the weather tool. The only thing is that it's a seemingly reduntant feature since altitude doesn't have any relevance during analysis!
Thanks SO much, this has been a life saver
Glad you liked it!
Hi Pushkin, i have downloaded the meteonorm 6.1. but i don't have any license like the serial number, so i just use the meteonorm6.1 as a demo. and i cannot save the file, in ".dat".
Do you have the serial number?
or how can i have meteonorm 5.1, is there a free download for meteonorm5.1 too?
Thank You
Hi Jacky!
Unfortunately Meteonorm is a paid software. If you are at university, then I am sure your university must be having a licenced copy. If you work somewhere, Meteonorm is a great piece of software for getting good quality weather data and you should persuade your office to buy a copy.
Cheers!
I need data location for PHPP. I cant do it on demo Meteonorm. Does anybody has original Meteonorm, and can help me?
What's PHPP?
Ummm, i see. Unfortunately, my university doesn't have it Pushkin.
So now, i input the weather data manually by running the ecotect's weather tool.
How can i make the weather file in ecotect?
I have tried and get some problems i wanna ask you.
When i input the temperature at hourly data (monthly average), i input the data (per month) and then i click syntethize (per month). Then i close the bar and save the weather as ".wea". But when i open it again, and i see the temperature is go down, i open again on the "hourly data" and saw that the data is different with what i input before. The temperature is going down (25C tobe 18C). Is it usually happened? is there any web about ecotect weather?
Thanks a lot..
The weather tool is unfortunately just a tool to visual existing data. It cannot generate data that Meteonorm can do. I am not sure what exactly you are doing, but you can't use weather tool to get weather data of new places!
ok… thanks for the information Pushkin
PHPP Passivhaus Projektierungs Paket
It is excell file for calculating energy efficience for buildings. I downloaded the meteonorm but in demo version you can get climate data just for some example cities. Meteonorm converts climate data, wich you can put in PHPP.
Pushkin,
I'm on the process of making a Weather Data File for Santa Fe, Argentina. And by accident I found your site. Just wanted to tell you, that what you say about Meteonorm is not completely true, at least in my case.
"…most of the weather stations are city airports which do not reflect the true weather conditions that might be prevailing on your site… The advantage of using Meteonorm to create a better .wea file is that this software extrapolates weather data from the nearest weather stations from the location that you have provided and gives results relevant to the site of the
project…."
I agree completely with you about using data from the site, and not the airports, but the funny thing i found out is that Meteonorm, uses as measurement stations, guess what, airports!. At least for argentinean cities. http://www.meteonorm.com/pages/en/meteonorm-6-onl…
Anyway, very usefull the post. Regards, Elian.
Hi Elian! I think you mis-interpreted what I was trying to write. What I was trying to say that if you create a site in Meteonorm from scratch, you need to specify the type of surroundings such as urban, highrise, etc… and Meteonorm automatically extrapolates data from the nearest stations to give a truer picture for your site.
Also, that links is excellent. Atleast we can see the exact position of all the weather station!
Cheers!
Thank you very much for the information, it has been very useful
I recognize many people are curious about this particular content and that i won’t deny I am moreover one of these. If there are some even more disccusion in regards to this matter in that case it’ll be a lot more appealing and I will probably want to consider of just what you would write pertaining to your up coming content. In the event that you can publish even more similar post, just make me aware since I am going to want to be able to read about this.
Article Builder, Generate Unique Articles, membership for articlebuilder…
[...]Creating a high quality Ecotect weather file from Meteonorm « Sustainotect[...]…