Climate Data to Support the Adaptation of Buildings to Climate Change in Canada

Abstract

Climate change will continue to bring about unprecedented climate extremes in the future, and buildings and infrastructure will be exposed to such conditions. To ensure that new and existing buildings deliver satisfactory performance over their design lives, their performance under current and future projected climates needs to be assessed by undertaking building simulations. This study prepares climate data needed for building simulations for 564 locations by bias-correcting the Canadian Regional Climate Model version 4 (CanRCM4) large ensemble (LE) simulations with reference to observations. Technical validation results show that bias-correction effectively reduces the bias associated with CanRCM4-LE simulations in terms of their marginal distributions and the inter-relationship between climate variables. To ensure that the range of projected climate change impacts are encompassed within these data sets, and to furthermore provide building moisture and energy reference years, the reference year files were prepared from bias-corrected CanRCM4-LE simulations and are comprised of a typical meteorological year for building energy applications, a typical and extreme moisture reference year, a typical downscaled year, an extreme warm year, and an extreme cold year.