Drop a weather file and get the four climate figures every early design decision leans on — with a citation you can paste straight into your assumptions log. Everything runs in this browser; the file is never uploaded anywhere.
Check this against a map before you trust anything below. If the latitude is not where you think your building is, you have the wrong file.
Station, WMO number, coordinates, design-data vintage, and the file it came from. A number without this is an incomplete entry.
These are the four numbers a climate analysis starts from. Read them off, write them down, cite the file.
Drag it. HDD65 and HDD50 for the same city differ by thousands, and the number alone tells you nothing. Whatever you write down, write the base next to it.
Degree days can be summed two defensible ways. This tool uses the daily-mean convention — (daily max + daily min) / 2, then the shortfall below base — which is how NOAA and ASHRAE published tables are built, and what the lecture describes. Ladybug sums hourly degree-time and divides by 24.
On a day averaging 66 °F there are still cold hours before dawn. The hourly method counts them; the daily-mean method cancels them against the warm afternoon. So the hourly figure runs consistently higher — for Detroit Metro at base 65 it is about 6,375 against 6,241, roughly 2%.
Neither is wrong, and that is the point. Same file, same base, different answer. State the method alongside the base, or the number is still not traceable.
Monthly mean dry-bulb, against the 68–78 °F comfort band. One hump or two, sharp or flat — this is what "the shape of the swing" means.
Every hour of the year: day across, hour of day down. Blue is below the comfort band, green is inside it, magenta is above. The blue is your heating gap and the magenta is your cooling gap — drawn, rather than described.
Reading it Vertical stripes are cold or hot spells. The dark band across the middle of summer is afternoon heat. The fraction inside the band is roughly the part of the year the building does not have to work for — the question a comfort analysis answers, asked early.
This reads the file and gives you the basic climate figures. The comfort-zone plot and the design-strategy percentages are the next step, and Climate Consultant does them properly. Use both — do not substitute this for that.