This study proposed a method to construct urban hourly weather data by adopting the ‘morphing’ approach considering urban heat islands. The method starts with the surrounding rural weather as the ‘baseline climate’ and an Urban Canopy Model is used to provide the differences in the monthly average values of major climate parameters due to urban heat islands. The ‘baseline climate’ is then morphed to generate the urban hourly weather file for building simulations. It was demonstrated that the constructed hourly weather data agree well with the observations. When used for building thermal simulations, the differences between the proposed approach and the observation in the total energy requirement of space heating and cooling and heat stress risk index were within 5% and 1.0°C, respectively.

Practical applications: The proposed approach will allow academics and building engineers to construct realistic urban hourly weather data to analyse the impacts of urban heat islands on energy requirements and thermal stress for different urban planning and design options.