Climatic parameters for building energy applications: A temporal-geospatial assessment of temperature indicators

Understanding the climate and location aspects are usually the first step in energy applications e from buildings to renewable energy. With so many of the renewable energy sources being significantly dependent on weather, it is essential that the temporal and geospatial variability and distribution of climatic design parameters are investigated for effective planning and operation. ASHRAE-HOF is the most widely used climatic design conditions database for building energy and HVAC professionals, but gaps exist in the literature on the geospatial and temporal distributions of the HOF dataset. This research explored geospatial distributions of key HOF (2009) climatic parameters: temperature (dry-bulb, wetbulb, dew-point and mean) and degree-days at various temporal scales. Identified spatial variability illustrate the effects of latitude, elevation, landuse and nearest coastline. Observed trends agree with conventional wisdom; however, sparse coverage in populated areas such as Africa and Asia diminish the versatility of the database. Variations in temperature exist, even between closely spaced sites e emphasizing the need to use location-specific data for enhancing the accuracy of the weather-related analysis. Moreover, latitudinal similarities in the distribution offer potential in identifying candidate locations for reciprocal transfer of knowledge on environmental design and operation. © 2016 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).