PROPOSAL OF A NUMERICAL PROCEDURE TO SELECT REFERENCE YEARS

A procedure is presented which can be used to create, from many years of available past weather data, a Reference Year consisting in 8760 hourly values of a few chosen meteorological quantities. Such ''year'' corresponds to a ''typical'' year for the considered locality, regarding both the occurrence and the persistence of different meteorological situations, in all months. This approach is a modification of the procedure used in the production of Test Reference Years or of Design Reference Years. In this approach, the frequency distributions relative to single months in the database are compared with the long-term frequency distribution of all the months ''with the same name.'' Furthermore, the correlation between subsequent daily values is taken into account.