INFLUENCE OF THE UNCERTAINTIES IN FUTURE CLIMATE SCENARIOS ON THE HYGRO-THERMAL SIMULATION OF AN ATTIC

Paper in proceeding, 2010

There is much concern about the effects of possible future climate changes on buildings. The future climate scenarios are based on numerical simulations. Each scenario of a climate model is the result of some changes in the boundary or initial conditions, emission scenario, etc. Consequently each weather scenario has different sources of uncertainty which affects the building simulation results. Having long term series of data makes the procedure of studying the influence of uncertainties difficult. In this paper the hygro-thermal response of a representative building part (cold attic) in different climate scenarios have been studied. The difference of the scenarios is in having different CO2 emission scenarios. The correlation between the climate in attic and the outer climate and also the sensitivity of the simulation results to different emission scenarios have been analyzed by using a statistical method based on decomposition of variabilites. The analysis is given for the city of Lund in Sweden and for the period from 1961 to 2100. The results show that the variabilities of the building simulation results are not following the same pattern as the weather data. It is not possible to analyze the future performance and risks based on one scenario.