Wind Driven Rain and Climate Change: A Simple Approach for the Impact Assessment and Uncertainty Analysis

Paper i proceeding, 2014

By increasing signs of climate change, growing knowledge about it and the availability of climate data, performing the impact assessment of climate change is becoming more feasible in different fields of science and engineering. However making practical conclusions out of the impact assessment is not easy since there are many climate scenarios for future. This introduces uncertainties in the impact analysis which should be considered. According to different climate scenarios Sweden faces warmer and moister climate. Rain shows strong signals of climate change; more rain in future and stronger and more often extreme raining events, which can increase the risks for buildings and the built environment. This paper makes a preliminary impact assessment of climate change for wind-driven rain (WDR) on buildings. A simple method from ASHRAE is used to calculate the amount of rain deposition on wall, using the hourly values of rain and wind data from 6 climate scenarios during 1961-2100. Results show that the amount of rain deposition will increase in future, however there are considerable differences in results induced by climate uncertainties. Further research and numerical simulations of WDR is needed to evaluate the preliminary results.