EVALUATING EARLY DESIGN CHOICES UNDER THE POTENTIAL EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

In a climate changing scenario, it is important to develop tools and methods to evaluate the potential effect of this phenomenon on bioclimatic solutions for the built-up environment. The present paper introduces a simple approach to compare the effect of different typical climate weather years (TMY) on expected comfort and discomfort hours by analyzing the potential impact of bioclimatic design choices. This method is conceived to be applied in early design phases, such as building programming, by integrating the well-recognized Givoni-Milne bioclimatic approach. Furthermore, the differences between several climate databases for Italy are analyzed and discussed, using a set of sample locations, in order to compare, not only the expected effect of climate changes (IPCC scenarios), but also the changes due to the choice of a specific TMY source from the existing ones.