Multivariate stochastic generation of meteorological data for building simulation through interdependent meteorological processes

Abstract

In recent years, the uncertainty of weather conditions and the impact of future climate change on building energy assessment has received increasing attention. As an important part of these studies, several types of methods for generating stochastic meteorological data have also been developed. Since solar radiation drops to zero at night, unlike the continuous 24-hour data for elements such as temperature and humidity, this has posed challenges for previous research to fully account for the simultaneity among multiple elements. Therefore, this study proposes a framework for meteorological data generation: First, perform multivariate time series modeling of meteorological data of air temperature, solar radiation and absolute humidity at 12:00 of each day of a typical year based on the S-vine copula method and simulating daily series data at 12:00 for 365 days. Then, based on the probability of change of each element evaluated from the historical meteorological observation data, the daily series data at 12:00 were expanded to 24 h, after which the yearly stochastic weather data were obtained. The analysis of 30 years of stochastic data generated by this method, compared with the original data, reveals that air temperature and solar radiation closely match the original distribution characteristics, except for a minor deviation in the absolute humidity’s kurtosis. Furthermore, the comparison of thermal load distributions for office buildings shows that the original data curve falls within the range of the generated data. This suggests that the generated data includes more information about uncertainty but still keeps the original data’s characteristics.