Development of decision support software for Taiwan local weather

For controlled environment agriculture (CEA) related facility planning and design, weather information for the specific location are required for the estimation of heating/cooling loads and design of environmental control components and systems. Summer/Winter design temperature and degree day were the traditional methods used by the engineers to estimate the annual cooling/heating load. Weather bin data is more advanced but provided in tabular format. Accumulative probability weather data is more flexible to use than tables or graphs and more easily computerized. Software developed in this study, using MATLAB under Windows environment, is capable of providing probability data for any user defined range of temperature (T) and/or relative humidity (RH) for any selected location provided in the database. Such information can also be presented as 2D and 3D plots. Monthly and seasonal information on T, RH, solar radiation and sunshine duration are also available. The software also identified the day with hottest average temperature and the day with hottest hourly temperature, and showed the trends of dry bulb, wet bulb temperature and relative humidity of these two particular days. Wet bulb depression of selected location is also available in the software. The applications of this software in temperature, humidity and radiation related decision making includes the determination on the suitability of growing certain crops in certain location, months required heating/cooling and the determination on cooling/heating load/costs , shading requirement, shading control and the limit on the performance of the evaporative cooling applied in certain locations, etc.