Adapting to a New Reality— Strategies for Building Energy Design in a Changing Climate
Abstract
Building energy design is traditionally performed using retro-
gressive data sets (e.g., the past 30 years of weather data). The implied
presumption has always been that this data will cycle back and forth
around relatively static baseline averages. With increasing evidence that
some level of climate change may be occurring, it is natural for building
owners, developers, designers, and managers to question whether (and
to what extent) these fundamental climate assumptions may be altered
in future years. Depending on a building’s locality, this could take the
form of increasing or decreasing trends in seasonal average tempera-
tures, daily maximum and minimum temperatures, relative humidity,
barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, cloud cover, and total
precipitation. These assumptions are crucial, because a typical build-
ing must remain habitable for 30 to 50 years (or longer) and provide its
owner with the maximum possible return on a sizeable capital invest-
ment.
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