Climate Consultant software & building design suggestions for the future climate

[Mike]

Tipped off a few days ago by @Nick Laslett's mention of the free Opaque software package (decrement delay calculator etc.), I experimented with another free package from the same site: Climate Consultant.

 

Climate Consultant indicates the potential effectiveness of different design strategies that could be adopted at a particular location, based on its typical local climate. Being based in France, I found it interesting to compare different geographic locations, but was thinking that it would be good if it were possible to use it to compare current and future climates in the same location. I spent a day or longer trying to pull together a similar comparison for a client some years ago

 

Today, I came across a website from the University of Bath - COLBE (https://colbe.bath.ac.uk/) - that provides separate future climate files for every 5 km square in the UK (and every 25 km for India), based on current projections. They're provided free and are in the same .epw format that Climate Consultant uses, so it's now easy to use it to compare climate design suggestions for a regular year or a heatwave year during 1961-1990, 2010-2039, and 2070-2099.

 

All suggestions are generic, not tailored to a particular building, but it's worth a look if you are into your building / climate science. The cut in the need for winter heating and the increased desirability of shading windows both stand out and, of course, the climate projections are scary.