Generation of typical meteorological years for the Argentine Littoral Region

Abstract

This work describes the generation of the typical meteorological year (TMY) for 15 locations all around the Littoral Region in northeastern Argentina, southeastern South America. The originally available weather data at each location contain, among others, dry-bulb and dew-point temperatures, wind velocity, and total sky cover, hourly measured during the period 1994–2014 by the National Meteorological Service (SMN) of Argentina. From other sources, two of these locations have hourly measured solar radiation during a few years. These radiation measurements were used to calibrate an existing Zhang–Huang solar radiation model that was then used to calculate the hourly solar radiation for the entire weather data base. Once we complete the long-term weather database at a given location, we define the typical meteorological year (TMY) at this location as the concatenation of 12 typical meteorological months (TMM). The typicality of a month is measured using Finkelstein–Schafer statistics based on nine daily indices (maximum, minimum and mean dry-bulb and dew-point temperatures, maximum and mean wind velocity, and global solar radiation). We finally show an example of application of the current TMYs for building energy simulation in a location deep inside Littoral. Subsequently we show the importance of the newly developed local TMY above using original TMY from neighbouring locations.