Impact of the Type of Weather Files on the Outcome of a Weather-Based Climate Classification: The Case of Brazil

We typically rely on fictitious years of weather data, i.e., reference years, to carry out energy analyses in representative climate conditions, since multi-year assessments of the building energy performance are computationally demanding and complete weather data series are available for a limited number of locations. In order to investigate this topic, in this work we quantified the extent to which the type of input weather file (TMY, TRY, etc.) can affect the outcome of a climate classification and building performance simulations. We focused on the case of Brazil by analyzing 480 locations and developing different reference weather files.