3.3. Meteorological Data: MetPreprocessor

Contributor:

Name

Institution

Fredrik Lindberg

Gothenburg
Introduction
MetPreprocessor can be used to transform required temporal meteorological data into the format used in UMEP. The following variables are usually required as a minimum: air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, incoming shortwave radiation and rainfall; if available, other variables can be supplied as well.

Input data can include any number of header lines and should be separated by conventional separators (e.g. comma, space, tab, etc). The output format is space-separated and includes time-related variables of year, day of year, hour and minute. The plugin is able to process other input time formats including month, day of month, etc. Possibility to use an EnergyPlus Weather (.epw) is also available. Note that .epw-files rarely have precipitation data included. This is is required for SUEWS-modelling and need to be acquired from elsewhere (external dataset).
Dialog box

top left	Select an existing text file with meteorological data at a temporal resolution between 5 min and 180 min (3 hours) that is divisible by 5 min. Tick in EPW box to convert an EnergyPlus Weather file.
middle left	Specify time-related columns in the imported data file.
lower left	Perform quality control (recommended): Select to perform a simple quality control which will check the input data for unreasonable values of each variable.
right	Choose columns from imported data file that correspond to the meteorological variables used in UMEP.

Variables included in UMEP meteorological input file
if acceptable range is not reasonable (i.e. beyond the limits we have set) please contact

No.	Header name	Description	Accepted range	Comments
1	iy	Year [YYYY]	Not applicable
2	id	Day of year [DOY]	1 to 365 (366 if leap year)
3	it	Hour [H]	0 to 23
4	imin	Minute [M]	0 to 59
5	qn	Net all-wave radiation [W m^-2]	-200 to 800
6	qh	Sensible heat flux [W m^-2]	-200 to 750
7	qe	Latent heat flux [W m^-2]	-100 to 650
8	qs	Storage heat flux [W m^-2]	-200 to 650
9	qf	Anthropogenic heat flux [W m^-2]	0 to 1500
10	U	Wind speed [m s^-1]	0.001 to 60
11	RH	Relative Humidity [%]	5 to 100
12	Tair	Air temperature [°C]	-30 to 55
13	pres	Surface barometric pressure [kPa]	90 to 107
14	rain	Rainfall [mm]	0 to 30	(per 5 min) this should be scaled based on time step used
15	kdown	Incoming shortwave radiation [W m^-2]	0 to 1200	Global irradiance on the horizontal plane
16	snow	Snow [mm]	0 to 300	(per 5 min) this should be scaled based on time step used
17	ldown	Incoming longwave radiation [W m^-2]	100 to 600
18	fcld	Cloud fraction [tenths]	0 to 1
19	wuh	External water use [m³]	0 to 10	(per 5 min) scale based on time step being used
20	xsmd	(Observed) soil moisture	0.01 to 0.5	[m³ m^-3 or kg kg^-1]
21	lai	(Observed) leaf area index [m² m^-2]	0 to 15
22	kdiff	Diffuse shortwave radiation [W m^-2]	0 to 600	Diffuse irradiance on the horizontal plane
23	kdir	Direct shortwave radiation [W m^-2]	0 to 1200	Beam/direct irradiance on a plane always normal to sun rays. One way to check this is to compare direct and global radiation and see if kdir is higher than global radiation during clear weather.
24	wdir	Wind direction [°]	0 to 360