Comparison of methodologies for TMY generation using 10 years data for Damascus, Syria

The generation of a typical meteorological year (TMY) is of great importance for calculations concerning many applications in the field of thermal engineering. The need of an accurate TMY for simulations has been well recognized over the years. Various methods for deriving TMYs have been developed, but their final results can be significantly different. In this paper, the major methodologies reported in the literature were applied to 10 year hourly measurements of weather data from Damascus, Syria. The TMYs obtained were evaluated according to their impact on the typical Syrian building’s thermal system in order to decide which method should be recommended for generating typical meteorological years and for predicting the performance of thermal systems in buildings. Based on simulation results for seasonally, monthly and daily building thermal loads, three widely used statistical estimators, namely, root mean square difference RMSD, total standard error SEE and chi square χ2 were calculated to assess the performance of each TMY. The findings showed that the TMY giving the closest performance to the average performance of the building’s thermal system as predicted using the 10 year weather data is the one generated by using the modified Sandia method. This method gives sufficiently accurate results compared with the other methods reported in the literature.