Journals Proceedings

Abstract

The impact of future climate scenarios on building energy consumption for ventilation, heating and cooling was investigated using very high spatial resolution urban meteorological data over Madrid and London areas and considering the Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 and 8.5 IPCC climate scenarios. To quantify the impact, we use very high resolution urban meteorological dataset produced by a dynamical downscaling process. This paper also presents the modeling system to make a dynamical downscaling process for urban climate information. The outputs of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) provides future climate scenarios, and its coupling with Weather Research and Forecasting and Chemical (WRF/Chem) model. The output from the WRF/Chem model at 1 km resolution is used to drive a micro-scale computational fluid dynamics model, MICROSYS. The final weather data was used in building energy simulations by EnergyPlus model. Sixteen types of buildings were simulated of each of the two cities under two possible climate scenarios for years 2011 and 2100. There is a net increase in energy consumption by the year 2100 for Madrid and London under 4.5 climate scenario and small decreases for the 8.5. This study represents one approach towards understanding how building energy consumption will change in the future