Every student and professional working in the construction industry would have always needed to find the coordinates of a certain site at least once during the project duration. This neat little tool (free) from Meteonorm allows one to zoom in to a location using Google maps, and will provide the co-ordinates in degrees/minutes or decimals, or the Swiss Grid (being a Swiss company, I expected this even though I haven’t seen it being used anywhere!)

Access the tool here:

Meteonorm: Coordinates

This post is an adaptation of Ted Ngai’s climatic visualization techniques with Matlab which can be seen here:

http://www.tedngai.net/experiments/climate-visualization-with-matlab.html

The only problem is that Ted’s scripts use Matlab, which is a commercial software and quite expensive. On the other hand, Microsoft Excel can be found on almost every machine!

I have adapted his script which uses Matlab to generate the heatmaps into Excel. Download the Excel file here:

Heatmap_v1

It isn’t that hard to work out, but even then I will give a small tutorial:

1. Click on the IMPORT .EPW button and select an EPW file. This will import the weather data into Excel automatically.
2. View the worksheets Ta, RH, Bn, Dh for the automatically generated heatmaps.

Quite simple!

Here are some screenshots for the Riyadh EPW file:

Ta: Dry bulb temperature

RH: Relative humidity

Bn: Direct beam radiation

Dh: Diffused horizontal radiation

If you print these as a PDF, they can be used Illustrator or other vector-based imaging programs.

Click the image to try it yourself!

Google Public Data Explorer is a new tool I found quite by chance which visualizes some very interesting databanks in a useful manner.

For example, the World Developement Indicators obtained from the World Bank include quite a few statistics relating to environment:

Agricultural land (% of land area)
CO2 emissions (kt)
CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita)
Electric power consumption (kWh per capita)
Energy use (kg of oil equivalent per capita)
Forest area (sq. km)
Improved sanitation facilities, urban (% of urban population with access)
Improved water source (% of population with access)
Renewable internal freshwater resources per capita (cubic meters)

All these statistics can be viewed over time for different countries or for the world as a whole and make some very interesting line graphs.

Issues like Population growth (annual %), Population (total), Poverty headcount ratio at national poverty line (% of population) are also present and can be used to solidify your stand on the environmental reasoning in your design.

Taking the case of CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita), this dataset can be viewed as a line graph.

It can also be represented as a bar graph and can be animated to show the CO2 emissions for the specified countries increased over time.

The data can also be visualized overlaid on a map getting a beautiful visual perspective of the data.

There are many more options, datasets worth exploring.

Head to Google Public Data Explorer to start exploring!

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.

Finding area of the contours of the ecotect analysis grid was something which I had to do for my dissertation relating to lighting analysis in atriums and the adjacent spaces. One of the grids whose area I had to find for the different bands of daylight factors is:

One of the easiest methods is clicking on the following:

REPORT > REPORT GENERATOR > Analysis Grid > Percentage Contours

which presents the following screen:

At the first glance, the table here gives the information we require, very nicely formatted as well. On a closer look, what it is doing is just adding the number of grid points which fall between a particular range (daylight factors from 0 to 10 in this case) and give the percentage from the total number of grid points. According to this report, no part of the floor get daylight factors in the range of 9-10.

The method I prefer is using Illustrator and a free plugin called path area. You can find it from the Telgraphics website. Please install it before continuing.

This did not work for me in Illustrator CS4, so the following steps are for Illustrator CS2:

1. First, clean up the grid for export. Switch off all zones (Zone Management tab), untick everything in the Data Overlay section (Display Settings tab) and select No Context in the Model Context section (Display Settings tab). Under Grid Settings section (Analysis Grid tab) make sure there is tick mark ONLY against Show Gridlines, Shade Grid Squares, Show Contour Lines. This should lead to a grid looking like the following:

2. Click on the little camera button on the bottom right part of the window, and select Copy as Metafile.

3. Open up Illustrator (CS2 here). Create a new document and press Ctrl+V to paste the copied meta file.

4. Ungroup the image by right-clicking on it and selecting Ungroup.

5. Select 1 square from the colour band whose area you want to know. Click on Select > Same > Fill Color. I have made a keyboard shortcut for this command as Shift+Ctrl+1.

6. Once all the same colour shapes are selected, click on Filter > Telegraphics > Path area. I have created a keyboard shortcut for this as Shift+Ctrl+2.

7. This shows a dialogue box which gives the perimeter and the area.

8. Now that you have the area, you can easily calculate the percentage of area lying in that range!

I know it’s not the true area, but you can use a multiplier to find the exact area as for your building using a simple excel formula.