Generation of a critical weather year for hygrothermal simulations using partial weather data sets

This paper offers a novel approach for selecting a critical weather year for hygrothermal simulations. The method is suitable, in particular, for the countries where a typical damage caused by the external environment is due to the freeze/thaw cycles in the external surface layers of building structures. The main advantage of the proposed treatment consists in its applicability for such locations where the long-term history of hourly weather data is not available. The lack of data is solved by the creation of an artificial weather history using the reference years from several different places having similar climate to the investigated locality. Then, the severity of each reference year is ranked by the newly formulated damage function, denoted as the Winter Index, and an inverse analysis is applied. After that, the mathematical relations between the weather data and the level of its severity to an investigated structure are found. Finally, the derived mathematical formulas are used to select the critical weather year using the monthly averages of partial weather data for the given location. The practical application of the method is demonstrated on the example of the Czech Republic. Similarly it can be used, e.g., for some other countries in the Central and Eastern Europe. However, the main ideas of the new approach can also be applied for many other geographical areas if the Winter Index is replaced by different damage functions characteristic for the particular territories. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.