Historical and future weather data for dynamic building simulations in Belgium using the regional climate model MAR: typical and extreme meteorological year and heatwaves

Abstract. Increasing temperatures due to global warming will influence building, heating, and cooling practices. Therefore, this data set aims to provide formatted and adapted meteorological data for specific users who work in building design, architecture, building energy management systems, modelling renewable energy conversion systems, or others interested in this kind of projected weather data. These meteorological data are produced from the regional climate model MAR (Modèle Atmosphérique Régional in French) simulations. This regional model, adapted and validated over Belgium, is forced firstly, by the ERA5 reanalysis, which represents the closest climate to reality and secondly, by three Earth system models (ESMs) from the Sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project database, namely, BCC-CSM2-MR, MPI-ESM.1.2, and MIROC6. The main advantage of using the MAR model is that the generated weather data have a high resolution (hourly data and 5 km) and are spatially and temporally homogeneous. The generated weather data follow two protocols. On the one hand, the Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) and eXtreme Meteorological Year (XMY) files are generated largely inspired by the method proposed by the standard ISO15927-4, allowing the reconstruction of typical and extreme years, while keeping a plausible variability of the meteorological data. On the other hand, the heatwave event (HWE) meteorological data are generated according to a method used to detect the heatwave events and to classify them according to three criteria of the heatwave (the most intense, the longest duration, and the highest temperature). All generated weather data are freely available on the open online repository Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5606983, Doutreloup and Fettweis, 2021) and these data are produced within the framework of the research project OCCuPANt (https://www.occupant.uliege.be/ (last access: 24 June 2022)​​​​​​​ – ULiège).