Paper Conference

Proceedings of BSO Conference 2020: Fifth Conference of IBPSA-England

     

PyClim: An open-source climate analysis toolkit

Darren Robinson

Abstract: An important first step in bioclimatic building design, is the analysis of climate data – to identify the opportunities and the threats posed by the climate at a given site location. Following a brief review of related climate analysis tools, this paper describes the structure and basis of PyClim, a modular open source Python-based toolkit for the analysis of climate data, and demonstrates its application; both standalone and via a web-interface. It is hoped that both the source-code and interface will be a useful resource to architectural science students and bioclimatic design practitioners. comprehensive of the tools currently available. It uses the powerful Matplotlib library (https://matplotlib.org) for graphical visualisation, it has a convenient web interface and it is open source. It is hoped that this will encourage contributions from other developers and that the source code (e.g. to compute sun position, sky radiance distribution, ground temperature or the psychrometric properties of air) will be a useful resource to architectural science students. With this in mind, this paper describes the structure and capabilities of PyClim, demonstrated through the analysis of climate data, primarily for Sheffield, UK.
Pages: 366 - 371
Paper:
bso2020_Robinson