PHOENIX — During the 2009 Greenbuild Expo Autodesk, Inc. announced that its Green Building Studio web-based service will now provide hourly weather data for 1.6 million virtual weather locations around the world. The previous version of the Autodesk Green Building Studio service supported 55,000 locations of weather data for North America and Northern Europe. The new version adds virtual weather locations for Central and Southern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, India, China, Japan, Philippines and South Korea.

Green Building Studio is an online software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, which is also available to subscribers of Autodesk Ecotect Analysis 2010 software during the term of their subscription. The web-based service helps architects and designers working within a building information modeling (BIM) process to perform whole-building energy and water analysis, optimize efficiency and work toward carbon neutrality earlier in the design process. With faster, more accurate performance analysis of building design proposals, architects and designers can evaluate sustainability earlier in the process and build more energy-efficient buildings.

The 1.6 million virtual weather locations now supported by the service are located no more than 8.8 miles from any given project location covered by the new data set. The new virtual weather locations were developed using weather data from a variety of government and other public sources, such as airports, ocean or river buoys, and aircraft and satellite readings. An observations-based physics model (mesoscale meteorological model) was then generated for each region.