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.

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.