Los Angeles County Archetypes in Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Region from ORNL's AutoBEM

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed the Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM) software suite to process multiple types of data, extract building-specific descriptors, generate building energy models, and simulate them on High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. For more information, see AutoBEM-related publications (bit.ly/AutoBEM).

To reduce computational demand for representing energy-related performance of a specific portion of the building sector, AutoBEM dynamically generated archetype buildings along with multipliers based on number of buildings and conditioned floor area.

Data provided include the geographical region around Los Angeles (LA) County in the state of California, data for each archetype building, and 84 building energy models for every relevant combination of building type and standard (i.e. building code vintage):

Region (2KB Region.zip) - shapefile of geographical area considered

Data (12KB Multipliers.csv) - minimalist list of each archetype building (rows) for the following fields (columns)

ID - unique identifier

County - county name

State - state name

CZ - ASHRAE Climate Zone designation

Area2D - footprint area (ft2)

Height - building height (feet)

NumFloors - number of floors (above-grade)

BuildingType - DOE prototype building designation (IECC=residential) as implemented by OpenStudio-standards

Standard - building vintage for building code requirements.

WWR_surfaces - percent of each facade (pair of points from Footprint2D) covered by fenestration/windows (average 14.5% for residential, average 40% for commercial buildings varying by building type)

Num_Building_Mult - number of buildings of each Building Type and Standard in this area.

Area_Multiplier - amount simulation outputs should be multiplied by to represent metrics for all buildings in the region.

Models (1.8MB Models.zip) - EnergyPlus building energy models named according to ID