Evaluation of ALARO-0 and REMO Regional Climate Models over Iran Focusing on Building Material Degradation Criteria

Abstract

Understanding how climate change affects material degradation is the first step in heritage conservation. To study such impact, high-resolution climate information is required. However, so far, no regional climate simulations have been evaluated considering building damage criteria over the region of Iran. This paper has a twofold objective: to conduct an overview of climate model performance over Iran by evaluating the output of two regional climate models, ALARO-0 and REMO2015, and to find an optimal approach for model evaluation fitted to studies on building physics. Data of the evaluation run for both models were compared with data of weather stations located in six different climate zones in Iran to assess their performance over the region and gain insight about model uncertainties. Given that the research scope covers the evaluation of climate models to use in studies on building physics, in addition to climate parameters, five degradation risks are analysed. The performance of the two models varies over the studied locations. In general, both models fall within the spread of observations except for wind parameters. Accordingly, indices related to temperature and precipitation are well predicted, in contrast to indices related to wind. The analysis shows that considering the observed biases, selecting an ensemble of representative models based on the evaluation results of climate variables important for hygrothermal simulations would be recommended.

Degradation of brick masonry walls in Europe and the Mediterranean: Advantages of a response-based analysis to study climate change

“…Sahyoun et al evaluated the potential of moisture reference years to study the climate change impact on freeze-thaw damage in Canadian solid masonry walls [24]. The changes in damage risks in Iranian historical buildings are studied by Hedayatnia et al [25]. Flyen et al analysed the changes in fungal decay in historical structures in Norway [26].…”

Modelling temperature‐precipitation pressures on African timber heritage

“…In African climate research, the use of MMEs, such as CMIP5 and CMIP6, are common (e.g., Almazroui et al, 2020; Creese & Washington, 2018). Studies of the climate change impact on heritage is often limited to regional climate models that target specific heritage sites (e.g., Bonazza et al, 2021; Kotova et al, 2023), cities (e.g., Vandemeulebroucke et al, 2021), countries (e.g., Hedayatnia et al, 2021; Orr et al, 2018) or continents (Sabbioni et al, 2010). There has been some engagement with reanalysis datasets such as ERA5 (e.g., Choidis et al, 2021; Nikolova et al, 2021; Vyshkvarkova & Sukhonos, 2023) and MERRA2 (e.g., Rosu et al, 2020) to study the potential pressures of changing climate on heritage, but these datasets relate only to past climate.…”