Future heating and cooling degree days for Belgium under a high-end climate change scenario

Abstract

The local outdoor climate and building characteristics influence the energy use of a building to an important extent. To design energy efficient and climate robust buildings, it is important to get insights into the energy demand over the building's service life from the early design phase onwards. This paper presents an overview of the different variants of the heating and cooling degree day method. A convection-permitting climate model is furthermore used to obtain heating and cooling degree days (for a baseline temperature of 18 °C) for the RCP 8.5 (high-end) climate change scenario for Belgium on a high-resolution grid of 2.8km. Area of focus for this paper is Belgium. The results demonstrate a decrease of the HDD with 27% between 1976-2004 (3189 HDD) and 2070-2098 (2337 HDD). In contrast, the CDD were found to increase with a factor 2.4 from 167 CDD to 401 CDD in the same timeline. Smaller reductions in average HDD were moreover found in urban areas compared to rural areas. For the CDD, a higher absolute increase was found for urban areas and the Northeast of Belgium.

Convection‐permitting modeling with regional climate models: Latest developments and next steps

“…Nonetheless, for the Sydney region, Argüeso et al (2015) showed that urbanization reinforces local warming, but conversely decreases the trend of increasing humidity. Ramon et al (2020) revealed a 27% decline in heating degree-days over Belgium due to more pronounced regional warming in urban areas only captured by a CPRCM. Using CPRCM outputs to force a building energy model for Tokyo, Arima et al (2016) showed a substantial increase in sensible and latent heat load in the next decade.…”

“…Helsen et al (2020) found that two different CPRCMs show consistent scale-dependency of the future increase in daytime summer hourly extreme precipitation, with larger differences in the climate change signals over flatlands than over mountainous regions. Using a CPRCM, Ramon et al (2020) were able to identify local temperature differences at the regional level and obtained better precision for the degree-days computation using hourly values.…”

What Are the Implications of Climate Change for Retrofitted Historic Buildings? A Literature Review

“…The changes in energy use highlight the need for adaptation and mitigation strategies. Since the existing climate zones may change in the future [48], as well as heating and cooling degree days [49,50], any new or updated regulation should consider these changes [51]. Moreover, inadequate sizing of systems could lead to energy inefficiency or discomfort.…”

Degree-hours and Degree-days in Coastal Mediterranean Cities, Patras and Kalamata, Greece

“…Spinoni et al (2018) [14] a lso applied HDD-CDD indicators to investigate whether energy demands for cooling and heating of buildings are projected to rise or fall due to climate change. Similarly, Andrade et a l. (2021) [15] Many researchers have reported the Mediterranean region as one of the most vulnerable areas to the projected climate change [14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. The current climate projections predict extreme weather events in the region in response to the warmer and drier periods in the near future.…”