Datasets created by joining twelve Typical Meteorological Months selected from a database of, usually, 30 years of CWEEDS data. The months are chosen by statistically comparing individual monthly means with long term monthly means for daily total global radiation, mean, minimum and maximum dry bulb temperature, mean, minimum and maximum dew point temperature, and mean and maximum wind speed.
The CWEEDS files are computer data sets of hourly weather conditions occurring
at 145 Canadian locations for up to 48 years of record, starting as early as
1953, and ending for most locations in 2001. The primary purpose of these files
is to provide long term weather records for use in urban planning, siting and
design of wind and solar renewable energy systems, and design of energy
efficient buildings. The general nature of the files, however, results in their
widespread applicability to any sector which is weather-sensitive, such as
transportation, air quality, agriculture, forestry, tourism, structural design,
or general interest.
Users will likely find most value in providing the files as input into other
software that processes the observational data in some way that provides more
specific information germane to the user's requirements. For example, the
information in the CWEEDS files can be used as input to design software that
simulates building or solar energy system performance on an hourly basis. Other
possibilities include the calculation of summary statistics regarding the wind
energy potential at a location, or finding the means, variability, extremes, or
frequency of other weather conditions or combination of conditions specifically
tailored to suit an application.
There is virtually no limit to the variety of useful analyses that can be
performed with the data in the CWEEDS files. The user will, however, need to
provide the software which will perform any additional analyses. Importing the
data into a spreadsheet or data base program is a common way in which further
analysis may be performed.
The CWEEDS CD-ROMs and disk only include compressed, formatted files of
observed and estimated weather observations, utility software to uncompress and
copy the files from the CD-ROMs, and documentation to explain the development,
content, and format of the files.
Most of the 21 weather elements such as temperature and wind speed have been
abstracted directly from the National Digital Climate Archives maintained by
the Atmospheric Environment Service (AES) of Environment Canada in Downsview,
Ontario. Nine of the weather elements relate to solar irradiance amounts and
have been estimated for each hour for those elements and locations for which
observations are not available.
The computer data sets are arranged so that one year of weather data for one
location is contained in one file about one megabyte in size in the
uncompressed, WYEC2 format described below. There are 48 files, for instance,
totalling over 48 megabytes disk space in WYEC2 format for the full 1953-2001
CWEEDS period of record. In total, the full CWEEDS 4500 files comprise a little
over 4.5 gigabytes.
A second set of files, called CWEC (Canadian Weather year for Energy
Calculation), has been provided for convenience for a limited number of the
locations. These files are described in Section 4.
