Dataset for “The week that will be: communicating climate change and the impact of climate change via extreme weeks”

The data set contain localized current and future heat waves for use in thermal modelling of buildings across the UK. The weather data is in the format of EnergyPlus Weather (.epw) which was developed for building simulation programs. The building simulation weather file contains 8,760 hours of all the thermally related weather variables such as dry-bulb temperature, dewpoint temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, direct and diffuse solar radiation, wind direction and speed. The weather file contains an Example Extreme Week (EEW), i.e., weather data from an extremely hot seven-day contiguous period. The initial date of the EEW is mentioned in the comment line of the weather file. The weather files are available for current and future time slices: 1970s (1961 to 1990) and 2080s (2079 to 2099) with three return periods (10, 20 and 50 years) and one baseline period. Hence, there are six extreme weather files and one baseline weather file in each subfolder. These weather files are available at a 5 km grid resolution across the UK. In total, there are 11326 grid locations aggregated into three zip files: TYPE_J01 (3,775 grids), TYPE_J02 (3,775 grids), and TYPE_J03 (3,776 grids). The grid number, latitude, longitude and elevation for each of 11326 grid locations can be found in ‘GridID_Lat_Long_Elev.csv’.The Spatial Urban Weather Generator (SUWG) developed by Newcastle University was used to produce hourly weather data at a 5 km resolution across the UK for the control period (1970s: 1961 to 1990) and future period (2080s: 2079 to 2099) under medium emission scenario (SRES A1B). We ran the SUWG 100 times for each grid to obtain 100 sets of 30-year long data, i.e., 3,000 sample years per grid location. The heat waves with three return periods were extracted from the sample years. The sample year which contains the heat wave was selected for the creation of the EnergyPlus Weather file representing an Example Extreme Week (EEW). The EEWs are available for the 1970s and 2080s with three return periods: 10, 20 and 50 years for each 5 km grid location in the UK.The Spatial Urban Weather Generator was used to generate current and future weather data for 11326 grid locations across the UK. We used MATLAB installed on the Balena High Performance Computing system to process the 30 TB weather data generated for 11,326 grid locations and created the building simulation weather files in the format of EnergyPlus Weather.The EPW format is a plain text format that may be processed with EnergyPlus open source software (https://energyplus.net/). The format is documented in the Auxiliary Programs documentation accompanying the software