WEA
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Radiance WEA Weather File Preview.
At a glance
| Purpose | Two unrelated weather formats share this extension: the hourly irradiance file of Daysim and Radiance, and a design-conditions file with monthly ASHRAE design values. |
| Extensions | .wea |
| Poka parser | poka-wea |
| Viewer | poka-chart-viewer |
| Depth tier | Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers) |
| Breadth tier | B2 Broad (see Breadth tiers) |
How much Poka reads
B2 Broad. The common content of the current and the common older versions is decoded. Some named features or versions are not, and are listed.
Confidence: high (the reviewer read the code and a test that proves the claim). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-16: poka-wea lib.rs (detect, parse_hourly, parse_design, build_chart_ast), main.rs and tests/samples.rs. Corpus: 2 Daysim/Radiance hourly files (Chicago, Denver) and 1 design-conditions file (PAE.wea, VERSION,12,0). Covers both variants. The hourly file is read in full and summarised as monthly statistics and a daily-mean chart.
What Poka does not read
- Daysim hourly file: individual hourly values are not shown (monthly mean and peak table plus a daily-mean chart only)
- Design-conditions file: monthly columns are shown as unlabelled Value 1, Value 2 and so on
- Design-conditions file: only the site line and the 99.6/0.4 percentile row are interpreted; other header rows are not decoded
- Design-conditions file has no chart
- Files that are not 8,760 hours are flagged, not given any further handling
- No format specification was cited for the design-conditions variant
Background
The Daysim and Radiance file has six keyword lines (place, latitude, longitude, time zone, elevation, units) and then 8,760 rows of month, day, hour, direct and diffuse irradiance. Longitude is positive west. The design-conditions file is comma-separated: a version line, the site, the heating and cooling design percentiles and one row per month. Poka tells them apart by the first line (place or VERSION,). It charts the hourly irradiance file; a design-conditions file gets a table without a chart.
Versions
| Version | Identifier | Poka | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daysim / Radiance hourly irradiance | place |
Read | |
| Design-conditions weather | VERSION, |
Partly read | Only the site line and the 99.6 and 0.4 percentile row are interpreted; the monthly columns are shown as unlabelled Value 1, Value 2 and so on, and there is no chart. |
Libraries
Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.
- Radiance (candidate; Radiance Software License 1.0 (BSD-style); C; https://github.com/NatLabRockies/Radiance) — archived mirror; live sync at github.com/LBNL-ETA/Radiance
- ladybug (reference; AGPL-3.0; Python; https://github.com/ladybug-tools/ladybug) — reference only, not usable in wasm
Sources
- parsers/poka-wea/src/lib.rs