Urban Weather for Energy Calculations: Advancing Building Energy Modelling with Urban Climate Contextualisation

Overheating is a pressing issue in the building sector, particularly in urban areas where it is intensified by the urban heat island. Despite significant advancements in Building Energy Modelling (BEM) tools, their accuracy in assessing overheating risks in urban environments is hindered by the lack of precise climate data. While methodologies such as the Urban Weather Generator were proposed for the creation of urban-specific weather files, their adoption remains limited. To help standardise urban climate contextualisation in BEM and foster the widespread use of urban weather data among both researchers and practitioners within the building sector, this work introduces the Urban Weather for Energy Calculations (UWEC). UWEC is intended to stablish predefined sets of urban weather files that capture the intra-urban heat variability within municipalities at the local scale and representative of a common temporal domain. A data-driven methodology, incorporating interpolation techniques, is used to define urban climate severity zones and generate urban weather files that represent typical conditions within each zone. This approach is tested in the city of Madrid, where nine different urban climate severity zones are identified, and their corresponding weather files are generated for the 2008–2017 temporal period. The results show up to 40% variability in cooling energy demand and 20% variability in heating energy demand between zones. This study demonstrates how UWEC can improve the assessment of overheating risks and support more effective urban heat adaptation strategies in the building sector.