ASHRAE ST-16-019

Abstract

Scope: This paper presents the results of ASHRAE Research Project RP-1561, Procedures to Adjust Observed Climatic Data for Regional or Mesoscale Variations. This project included a Weather Research Forecast (WRF) modeling campaign designed to cover ten significant climate regions across North America. Model results were compared against mesoscale monitoring data to assess the model’s performance for a single year’s hourly weather. Subsequently,along-term climatemodel evaluation was performed by runningWRFover four regions in North America for eight years. Overall, the model performed well against observed temperature and humidity, reasonably well against observed wind, and relatively poorly against observed solar radiation and precipitation. Guided by this evaluation, a complete mesoscale numerical modeling procedure was developed for coastal regions, mountain valleys, mountain plateaus, and major city centers to provide site-specific climate data (i.e., a freely available software solution for developing localized climate data).