Climate consultant 3.0: A tool for visualizing building energy implications of climates

Designing and remodeling buildings that are truly climate responsive depends first on gaining a detailed accurate understanding of the local climate. A newly revised design tool called Climate Consultant 3.0 has just been released that is intended for architects, students of architecture, builders, contractors, and knowledgeable homeowners. It reads the local climate data for all 8760 hours per year in EPW (EnergyPlus Weather) format files which are now available for over a thousand stations around the world. For any chosen location Climate Consultant 3.0 will display dozens of different graphic images of various weather attributes and will suggest building design strategies appropriate for the unique characteristics of that climate. Both Climate Consultant and EPW Climate Data are available on the web at no cost. Compared to the prior versions, the new Climate Consultant 3.0 is now written in Java making it compatible with both Mac and PC machines. Instead of using the older compressed TMY climate data, it now directly reads EPW files which include over a thousand new stations. It now also allows instant conversion between Imperial (inch-pound) and Metric (SI) units. Climate Consultant 3.0 also adds a number of new features, especially the new Wind Wheel.