This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The weather files engineers use to design buildings are built from decades of historical measurements. The data can be more than 30 years old.
But a building designed today is expected to perform well in 2080, and ideally beyond. Researchers from Norway and Portugal have now released future meteorological data covering more than 5,000 European locations. The files are reliable projections of Europe's future climate, down to specific time periods and places.
The entire dataset is freely available at climatedataforbuildings.eu. "The gap between the climate conditions we use in our calculations and the climate the building will experience could exceed half a century," says professor Thomas K. Thiis of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).
Together, researchers from NMBU in Norway and the University of Coimbra in Portugal have developed and evaluated future weather files that allow buildings to be designed for the climate they will experience. A Typical Meteorological Year, or TMY, is the standard climate input for every building energy simulation, from a single house to a hospital campus. TMYs are assembled from historical observations, so they describe the climate of the past.
But buildings designed today will experience a different climate. A Future Meteorological Year (FMY) applies climate change projections to the historical baseline. It produces an hourly weather file for a specified future period and an emissions scenario that can be used directly in existing simulation software.
In a new study published in the Journal of Building Performance Simulation, researchers evaluated a large pool of global and regional climate models. They identified those that reproduce summer and winter conditions across Europe satisfactorily, and only these selected models were used to generate the FMYs. The resulting files rest on the most reliable projections available for the European continent.
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