Variant developments of typical meteorological years (TMYs) for Seeb, Oman and their impact on energy simulation of residential buildings

Typical meteorological years (TMYs) are widely used for the analysis and simulation of energy-intensive systems. The reliability of a developed typical year depends on the accuracy of the historical record of weather data as well as the fitness of the developed approach to the application. In this work, a TMY for Seeb area in the Muscat Governorate, Oman was developed using different approaches. The developed TMYs are compared to the current commonly used TMY which is based on 1985-2001 records that have many gaps and anomalies and hence have intensive interpolation treatment. The different TMYs were compared by simulating energy consumption of a typical residential building and also by studying applicability of passive cooling strategies. The findings showed that the variation in energy consumption is minimal for the different TMY development approaches for the same set of historical records but the difference is very significant when the comparison is based on the two sets from the two periods of records.