Effects of Recent Climate Change on Hourly Weather Data for HVAC Design: A Case Study of Osaka

• Main Authors: Jihui Yuan, Kazuo Emura, Craig Farnham
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-03-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: climate change; building energy conservation; HVAC design; new design hourly weather data; peak outdoor air load
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/3/861

The current design weather data used for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) design in Japan was created using an old data period. New design weather data should be created to reflect recent local climate change. Based on our previous proposal of creating design weather data with two weather indices (dry-bulb temperature and enthalpy) for HVAC design, design weather data for Osaka was created using more recently-measured weather data (period: 2001~2015) from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) in this study. The effect of recent climate change on the design weather data created with eight proposed methods was found. It showed the change in weather elements for cooling design clearly trends to warmer and drier weather, with more solar radiation and lower enthalpy, while the trends in heating design are less clear, mainly showing higher enthalpy. Furthermore, the difference in the peak load for the heating and cooling designs using the new and old design weather data was compared. The comparison showed that the minimum difference in peak load for the heating design was found using the mean daily dry-bulb temperature as the first and second indices; for the cooling design, the minimum difference in peak load was found using mean daily enthalpy as both the first and second indices.