What Climate Dashboard does

Reads an EnergyPlus Weather file and turns it into a climate brief: what the climate is, the numbers that matter, and a ranked list of what it asks of the building. Every finding links to the chart that proves it. All computed in your browser, with no AI needed.

Input:

.epw / .zip

Layers:

Brief · Evidence · Hand-off

Output:

Design findings + charts

How it works

An EPW file carries its own ground truth — an ASHRAE design-conditions header and a .stat sidecar generated from the same 8760 rows. That makes every number here checkable against the file itself, and it is: any disagreement is unambiguously our error, not a different station or period of record. A second harness checks the derived physics against the published reference libraries.

• Psychrometrics per the ASHRAE Handbook of Fundamentals, checked against PsychroLib 1.1.1: worst wet-bulb error 0.0009 K, worst dew-point error 0.0012 K.
• Solar position from a Meeus-based implementation, checked against pvlib's NREL SPA: worst altitude error 0.012°, worst azimuth error 0.073°.
• Wind-rose sector binning and ASHRAE 55 adaptive comfort checked against ladybug-core / ladybug-comfort — exact agreement, to 1e-9 K on the comfort temperatures.
• 12,822 automated checks against those three libraries: 12,822 PASS, 0 FAIL.
• 1,037 checks against the EPW's own header and .stat sidecar: 1,036 PASS, 0 FAIL, 1 SKIP (no reference available).
• Bioclimatic strategy zones are additionally benchmarked by hand against Climate Consultant 6.0.4, which has no scriptable interface.

How to use it

1. Load a climate file. Pick a station on the map or drop your own .epw or .zip.
2. Read the brief. The climate named, six headline numbers, the year at a glance, and ranked design findings. Enough on its own for most projects.
3. Check the evidence. Four sections by design question: heat and cold, sun and sky, wind, water and humidity. Each opens on one chart, with the rest behind More detail.
4. Take it further. Open the same station in Sun Path, Daylight, U-Value, Wind or PV, copy the link, or print the brief.
5. Ask the advisor. Optional. The advisor discusses the findings; it never gates them.

Best used for

• Opening a project on an unfamiliar site and knowing within minutes what the climate asks of the building.
• Backing a design decision with the chart that proves it, in a report or a crit.
• Picking the station and design conditions the rest of your analysis will run on.
• Teaching climate-responsive design from real data rather than a textbook diagram.

Not a substitute for

• Predicting a specific future year — an EPW is a typical year assembled from history, not a forecast.
• Energy-code compliance documentation.
• Microclimate at your exact site: the station may be kilometres away, at a different elevation, and usually at an airport.

Known limits

• A typical meteorological year smooths away the extremes an actual year contains. Design conditions in the header, not the 8760 rows, are what you size plant against.
• Station representativeness is the dominant error, and it is not one this tool can measure for you — check the distance and elevation before trusting a number to the degree.
• Older EPWs can predate the current climate by decades; the period of record is in the header and worth reading.
• Bioclimatic zones follow Givoni-style boundaries, which are conventions rather than physics — treat the strategy list as a prompt, not a specification.

Read the full Climate Dashboard guide →