Building designers, services engineers and managers have had limited climate and weather data on which to base their simulations.
Now, in-depth data sets are available for 225 sites across Australia. These include the NatHERS/CSIRO ‘climate zones’ and extra sites within the metro areas to allow for micro-climate differentiation.
In early August, Exemplary Energy published the full 34-year weather record, as well as the options below, through their sales portal which includes an interactive map to aid selection:
- Full historical weather record (1990-2023) in ACDB, TMY2 and EPW file formats
- Reference Meteorological Year (RMY) derived from:
- 34 Years
- 15 Years
- 15 Years with precipitation
- 3 Typical Meteorological Years (TMY) for façade-dominated, neutral and deep plan buildings
- eXtreme Meteorological Years (XMY) for solar PV - 1, 10, 90, and 99%ile
- Ersatz Future Meteorological Year (EFMY) 2050
The University of New South Wales recently purchased the climate data for all 225 stations for the APVI’s SunSPOT interactive website designed to encourage domestic scale solar PV adoption.
UNSW chose RMYs based on the most recent 15 years of data “as better reflecting future climate”.
Additionally, 8 capital city hygrothermal RMYs (15 years with precipitation) were donated to Germany’s Fraunhoffer Institute for inclusion in their WUFI version 7 for use by building physicists and practitioners since March 2025.
Readers can test any of these weather and climate files FOR FREE by one-off downloading from Exemplary’s data file portal.
Additionally, Real Time Year weather files (RTYs) are available monthly for the 8 capitals as used in the freely published Exemplary Weather and Energy Index (EWEI), making the data immediately useful for digital twin operational monitoring for sound facilities management.