Enhancing Building Resilience: The Role of Future Weather Data in Building Design
Arjita Gupta, Amanda Thounaojam, Prasad Vaidya | 30 December 2024
With climate change driving unprecedented shifts in global weather patterns, the need to future-proof building designs has become critical. Current design practices predominantly rely on simulations and analysis that use Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) files, which are based on historical weather data and may not reflect future climatic conditions. This could result in buildings that may not be able to adapt to long-term climate change. Our study examines whether the use of future weather data in design analysis points to different strategies and is necessary to successfully predict building performance. We used predicted future weather data for 2080 in Bangalore, India, which forecasts a global temperature of 4°C temperature increase and historical Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data, compared these data, conducted analysis to determine the passive and active strategies that get prioritised from the analysis and compare these. We used a calibrated Building Energy Simulation (BES) model of a building in Bangalore to determine how the performance of the building changes under future weather conditions. The future weather indicates significant temperature rise across all seasons, increase in summer temperatures of 10°C; decreasing relative humidity in summer and increasing in winter; a reduction of 16.2% for number of hours in the comfort range. The design analysis indicated that different active and passive design strategies gets prioritised for the future weather scenario. The calibrated models shows that while the passive design features incorporated in the building are adequate for the TMY weather conditions, they may fail to maintain thermal comfort in the future. The percentage of discomfort hours in the future condition increased by 37%. These findings indicate for future-proof our buildings it is necessary to use future weather data during the design stages while selecting climate-responsive strategies. Analysis methods must incorporate future weather conditions for climate resilient building. The findings also indicate that the sole use of current weather data results in passive and active strategies that will not be appropriate for future climate-changed forced weather conditions.