Ten questions on the generation of Typical Solar Radiation Years for daylight simulations: A systematic review

Abstract

Daylighting studies always bring new requirements of growing sophistications, following almost identical simulation procedure that yields spatiotemporal luminous results. While these simulations require defining a complex set of input variables, architects can easily fine-tune the precision of internal inputs, but external inputs, especially Typical Weather Datasets (TWDs), remain beyond their direct control. The implications of adopting weather data in simulation tools, particularly solar radiation, have thereby been acknowledged, especially when initial approximations of daylighting performance are required during the early stages of design. This gave rise to two distinct, yet related, active areas of research: (i) comparing the capabilities of different TWDs under various daylighting situations, and (ii) generating a specific type of TWDs that depends mainly on solar radiation data, known as Typical Solar Radiation Years (TSRYs). Within the context of daylight simulations, this work represents an unprecedented contribution that systematically investigates the growing directions on the comparison of TWDs (84 comparisons over 11 studies, published between 2013 and 2021) and generation of TSRYs (183 generation attempts over 27 studies, published between 1994 and 2023). Building upon ten established questions, this work puts a particular focus on three hierarchal review scopes: original long-term data, generation process and limitations. This review is conducted with the architects’ nature in mind to clarify nuances of weather datasets and their generation procedures, uncovering knowledge gaps in the related research domain, while sketching future perspectives and missing opportunities. Ultimately, this shall improve the reliability of adopting these datasets in daylight simulations, making them more comprehensible for architects with diverse expertise and backgrounds.