COLBE

2023

1. 

   The Week That Will Be: Communicating the Impact of Climate Change via Extreme Weeks

   David A. Coley, Chunde Liu, and Daniel Fosas

   Building and Environment, 2023

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   As events like the 2003 European heatwave showed (where 14,000 people died in Paris alone), it is in the extremes of weather, not the mean climate, where much climate change risk lies. Communication with the public, or the testing of natural and human-made environments via simulation, has focused however on the mean situation. To many, a future 2 or even 4 °C rise in mean temperature will seem modest and hence fail to convey the scale of the issue, thereby creating a gap between reality and expectation. Here we use the idea of presenting an audience with a week-long time series of future local extreme weather as a way of bridging this gap. A week has both vernacular currency and covers the length of many heatwaves. We generate UK future weeks in 2030, 2050 and 2080 at a 5 km interval, thereby allowing interested parties to visualise for the first time likely future heatwaves in their locality. Future heatwaves of similar form as the 2003 Paris event are found, but with even higher temperatures, suggesting the likelihood of largescale mortality. We apply the approach to the conditions within a UK home under future heatwaves with return periods of 10–50 years. Conditions far beyond adaptive comfort limits are found. Weather files containing the extreme weeks for 11,326 locations have been prepared and are made available. These will be of use to those trying to explain the likely impacts of climate change, governments setting resilience policy and those using computer modelling.

   @article{coley2023week_that_will_be,
     title = {The Week That Will Be: Communicating the Impact of Climate Change via Extreme Weeks},
     author = {Coley, David A. and Liu, Chunde and Fosas, Daniel},
     year = {2023},
     journal = {Building and Environment},
     volume = {227},
     pages = {109809},
     issn = {0360-1323},
     doi = {10.1016/j.buildenv.2022.109809},
     url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360132322010393},
   }

2020

1. 

   An analytical heat wave definition based on the impact on buildings and occupants

   Alfonso Ramallo-Gonzalez, Matt E. Eames, Sukumar Natarajan , and 2 more authors

   Energy & Buildings, 2020

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   Alongside a mean global rise in temperature, climate change predictions point to an increase in heat waves and an associated rise in heat-related mortality. This suggests a growing need to ensure buildings are resilient to such events. Unfortunately, there is no agreed way of doing this, and no standard set of heatwaves for scientists or engineers to use. In addition, in all cases, heat waves are defined in terms of external conditions, yet, as the Paris heat wave of 2003 showed, people die in the industrialised world from the conditions inside buildings, not those outside. In this work, we reverse engineer external temperature time series from monitored conditions within a representative set of buildings during a heat wave. This generates a general probabilistic analytical relationship between internal and external heatwaves and thereby a standard set of events for testing resilience. These heat waves are by their simplicity ideal for discussions between clients and designers, or for the setting of national building codes. In addition, they provide a new framework for the declaration of a health emergency.

   @article{ramallo2020analytical,
     title = {An analytical heat wave definition based on the impact on buildings and occupants},
     volume = {216},
     journal = {Energy \& Buildings},
     author = {Ramallo-Gonzalez, Alfonso and Eames, Matt E. and Natarajan, Sukumar and Fosas, Daniel and Coley, David A.},
     year = {2020},
   }

2018

1. 

   Mitigation versus Adaptation: Does Insulating Dwellings Increase Overheating Risk?

   Daniel Fosas, David A. Coley, Sukumar Natarajan , and 3 more authors

   Building and Environment, 2018

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   Given climate change predictions of a warmer world, there is growing concern that insulation-led improvements in building fabric aimed at reducing carbon emissions will exacerbate overheating. If true, this would seriously affect building regulations all over the world which have moved towards increased insulation regimes. Despite extensive research, the literature has failed to resolve the controversy of insulation performance, primarily due to varied scope and limited comparability of results. We approach this problem through carefully constructed pairwise comparisons designed to isolate the effect of insulation on overheating. We encompass the complete range of relevant variables: latitude, climate, insulation, thermal mass, glazing ratio, shading, occupancy, infiltration, ventilation, orientation, and thermal comfort models — creating 576,000 building variants. Data mining techniques are implemented in a novel framework to analyse this large dataset. To provide confidence, the modelling was validated against data collected from well-insulated dwellings. Our results demonstrate that all parameters have a significant impact on overheating risk. Although insulation is seen to both decrease and increase overheating, depending on the influence of other parameters, parameter ranking shows that insulation only accounts for up to 5% of overall overheating response. Indeed, in cases that are not already overheating through poor design, there is a strong overall tendency for increased insulation to reduce overheating. These results suggest that, in cases with acceptable overheating levels (below 3.7%), the use of improved insulation levels as part of a national climate change mitigation policy is not only sensible, but also helps deliver better indoor thermal environments.

   @article{fosas2018mitigation,
     title = {Mitigation versus Adaptation: Does Insulating Dwellings Increase Overheating Risk?},
     volume = {143},
     journal = {Building and Environment},
     year = {2018},
     pages = {740--759},
     author = {Fosas, Daniel and Coley, David A. and Natarajan, Sukumar and Herrera, Manuel and Fosas-de-Pando, Miguel Angel and Ramallo-Gonzalez, Alfonso},
   }

2017

1. 

   Probabilistic adaptive thermal comfort for resilient design

   David A. Coley, Manuel Herrera, Daniel Fosas , and 2 more authors

   Building and Environment, 2017

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   Adaptive thermal comfort theory has become the bedrock of much thinking about how to judge if a free-running environment is suitable for human occupation. In design work, the conditions predicted by a thermal model, when the model is presented with one possible annual weather time series (a reference year), are compared to the limits of human comfort. If the temperatures are within the comfort limits, the building is judged to be suitable. However, the weather in many locations can vary year-on-year by a considerable margin, and this begs the question, how robust are the predictions of adaptive comfort theory likely to be over the many years a building might be in use? We answer this question using weather data recorded for up to 30 years for locations within each of the five major Köppen climate classifications. We find that the variation in the annual time series is so great that the predicted comfort temperature frequently lies outside the acceptable range given by the reference year. Return periods for the excursions of the time series are calculated for each location. The results for one location are then validated using the world’s longest temperature record. These results suggest that industry and academia would be best advised to move to a probabilistic methodology, like the proposed one, when using adaptive comfort theory to judge the likely conditions within a building. Extra pertinence is provided by concerns over increases in mortality and morbidity in buildings due to a rapidly warming climate.

   @article{coley2017probabilistic,
     title = {Probabilistic adaptive thermal comfort for resilient design},
     journal = {Building and Environment},
     volume = {123},
     pages = {109--118},
     year = {2017},
     author = {Coley, David A. and Herrera, Manuel and Fosas, Daniel and Liu, Chunde and Vellei, Marika},
   }