Future Typical Meteorological Year (fTMY) US Weather Files for Building Simulation

As global emissions and temperatures continue to rise, global climate models offer projections as to how the climate will change in years to come. These model projections can be used for a variety of end-uses to better understand how current systems will be affected by the changing climate. While climate models predict every individual year, using a single year may not be representative as there may be outlier years. It can also be useful to represent a multi-year period with a single year of data. Both items are currently addressed when working with past weather data by a using Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) methodology. This methodology works by statistically selecting representative months from a number of years and appending these months to achieve a single representative year for a given period. In this analysis, the TMY methodology is used to develop Future Typical Meteorological Year (fTMY) using climate model projections. The resulting set of fTMY data is then formatted into EnergyPlus weather (epw) files that can be used for building simulation to estimate the impact of climate scenarios on the built environment.

This dataset contains fTMY files for 18 cities in the continental United States. The locations are representative cities for each climate zone. The data for each city is derived from six different global climate models (GCMs) from the 6^th Phase of Coupled Models Intercomparison Project CMIP6- ACCESS-CM2, BCC-CSM2-MR, CNRM-ESM2-1, MPI-ESM1-2-HR, MRI-ESM2-0, NorESM2-MM. The six climate models were statistically downscaled for 1980–2014 in the historical period and 2015–2059 in the future period under the SSP585 scenario using the methodology described in Rastogi et al. (2022). Additionally, hourly data was derived from the daily downscaled output using the Mountain Microclimate Simulation Model (MTCLIM; Thornton and Running, 1999). The shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) used for this analysis was SSP 5 and the representative concentration pathway (RCP) used was RCP 8.5. More information about SSP and RCP can be referred to O’Neill et al. (2020).

More information about the six selected CMIP6 GCMs:

ACCESS-CM2 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/ES19040

BCC-CSM2-MR - https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-2977-2021

CNRM-ESM2-1- https://doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001791

MPI-ESM1-2-HR - https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-3241-2019

MRI-ESM2-0 - https://doi.org/10.2151/jmsj.2019-051

NorESM2-MM - https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6165-2020

Additional references:

O’Neill, B. C., Carter, T. R., Ebi, K. et al. (2020). Achievements and Needs for the Climate Change Scenario Framework. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 1074–1084 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-00952-0

Rastogi, D., Kao, S.-C., and Ashfaq, M. (2022). How May the Choice of Downscaling Techniques and Meteorological Reference Observations Affect Future Hydroclimate Projections? Earth's Future, 10, e2022EF002734. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF002734

Thornton, P. E. and Running, S. W. (1999). An Improved Algorithm for Estimating Incident Daily Solar Radiation from Measurements of Temperature, Humidity and Precipitation, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 93, 211-228.

Shovan Chowdhury, Fengqi Li, Avery Stubbings, Joshua R. New, Deeksha Rastogi, and Shih-Chieh Kao (2023). "Future Typical Meteorological Year (fTMY) US Weather Files for Building Simulation for every US County (West and Midwest)." ORNL internal Scientific and Technical Information (STI) report, doi:10.5281/zenodo.8338549, Sept 2023. [Data]

Shovan Chowdhury, Fengqi Li, Avery Stubbings, Joshua R. New, Deeksha Rastogi, and Shih-Chieh Kao (2023). "Future Typical Meteorological Year (fTMY) US Weather Files for Building Simulation for every US County (East and South)." ORNL internal Scientific and Technical Information (STI) report, doi:10.5281/zenodo.8335815, Sept 2023. [Data]

Bass, Brett, New, Joshua R., Rastogi, Deeksha and Kao, Shih-Chieh (2022). "Future Typical Meteorological Year (fTMY) US Weather Files for Building Simulation (1.0) [Data set]." Zenodo, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6939750, Aug. 2022. [Data]