Climate Scientists Called on to Produce Projections for Architects

Dear BG: Thank you for highlighting this important problem. I look forward to reading the HGA report. Here are some quick reactions to this article:

We are fast approaching severeral tipping points in our global environmental and social systems, so we need to act now. More awareness and guidance for adapting buildings to future climates are definitely needed. However, we probably need funding and technical assistance to jump start such efforts, plus guidance and standards, i.e, a carrot and stick approach.

In the meantime, we need disclaimers on buildings, especially those housing heat senstive populations, that the building is desinged for an outdated, historical climate data and not on future weather climates. Some building engineers in British Columbia are already advising clients on how to adapt to future climates, and requiring them to sign an acknowledgment if they do not accept those design recommendations.

For life cycle and power outage design standards to prevent indoor overheating (and usually underheating prevention), the U.S. could easily learn from the examples of several European nations, Canada, and Australia to provide future weather (hourly) files. This would not only help reduce indoor overheating risks to health and productivity, but also reduce peak cooling demand on the grid, GHG emissions, low efficiency lock-in, liability, and operating costs.

FYI, here is a summary of global developments in the area future weather files, urban heat adjustments, and climate adapted/resilient building standards: Phillips, June 2022, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iHzsMznr5XsUQDPHuRTiPC4UNnF8BRTP/view?u....

Since 2012, I have requested that the California Energy Commission and the Cal Adapt program to provide future weather files, but we have yet to see much progress. Last spring and in previous years, we have proposed that California consider climate resilience standards to prevent overheating due to climate change and urban heat impacts, but the proposals have been rejected. For example, here is the 2023 Cal Green proposal: Phillips, 2023, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U0PZSJp1BpQmlZ7CEYrmZ3sGaqnVSkhb/view?u.... As a foot in the door, I would be happy to just to see some assessments of thermal comfort using existing standards under current climates and historical heat waves!!

However, we are expecting a much more frequent, longer, and severe heat waves, heat storms, heat domes, power outages, etc. in the near future, so this approach would still underestimae the impacts of climate change. In addition, we  know that climate change models do not currently estimate very extreme events very well, e.g., the Pacific NW Heat Dome. Nor do they characterize major climate factors such as glacier melting rates, e.g. 200% increase in sea level rise vs. current models, https://phys.org/news/2023-05-rapid-ice-greenland.html?utm_source=nwlett....

BTW, your summary of the report stresses the difficulty of getting future weather files for building modeling in the U.S., but I think this is overstated.  Morphed future weather files, although not ideal, have been available at a low or zero cost for years. Better yet, downscaled future weather files are available at no cost (other than labor to extract the data) from CORDEX and NCAR, so that goverment agencies could produce future weather files for general use (see Machard et al. 2020, https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/13/3424). Downscaled future weather files that included urban heat increases are already available from AltoStratus for California locations at a modest price.

This  problem of accessing future  weather files may mainly be one of building owners, designers, and/or engineering firms that are small, lack resources, or do not realize their liabilty risks for not preventing overheating, wind blown rain, and other climate impacts under current and future climates.  The residential building sector tends to have more of these barriers to climate adapted design vs. the commerical building sector, but that is where our most vulnerable folks live and often work.

Creating consumer, public, and taxpayer demand for climate adapted buildings is also needed to move the building sector in the right direction. Focused info, public education, and professional training campaigns, and perhaps labeling of key buildings for overheating risk, would also help build the awareness and demand for healthy buildings that are not maladapted to our rapidly changing climates.

One ray of hope is that multi objective optimization of energy, GHGs, overheating, cosets, etc. is already being done by many researchers and some designers, and that machine learning and artificial intelligence will rapidly accelerate this trend.

Salud and keep up the great work in future proofing our built environment!

Tom Phillips

Thank you Tom, I so appreciate your kind words and reactions. Your response includes lots of resources and updates I wasn't even aware of--and I try to follow these things pretty closely!

That, I think, illustrates one of your main points: downscaled, TMY files might actually be fairly available (though, my inclination is that is probably only the case for some select regions). But it takes resources and time to track these updates, understand where to look, and then make sure you are working with the latest information as the climate science continually evolves. That's a fairly high hurdle; one that might be more streamlined if climate scientists embraced architects as a core end user. 

I am taking note of your idea to label buildings for overheating risk--genius. 

Finally, stay tuned for some future coverage. My next piece is about a study modeling the impact of passive cooling strategies on thermal comfort using weather files from the recent PNW heat dome event.