Modelling of building performance under the UK climate change projections and the prediction of future heating and cooling design loads in building spaces

New climate change projections for the UK were published by the United Kingdom Climate Impacts Programme in 2009. They form the 5th and most comprehensive set of predictions of climate change developed for the UK to date. As one of main products of UK Climate Projections 2009 (UKCP09),the Weather Generator, can generate a set of daily and hourly future weather variables at different time periods (2020s to 2080s) and carbon emission scenarios (low, medium, high) on a 5 km grid scale. In a radical departure from previous methods, the 2009 Projections are statistical- probabilistic in nature. A tool has been developed in Matlab to generate future Test Reference Year (TRY) and Design Reference Years (DRY) weather files from these Projections and the results were verified against results from alternative tools produced by Manchester University and Exeter University as well as with CIBSE's Future Weather Years (FWYs) which are based on earlier (4th generation) climate change scenarios and are currently used by practitioners. The Northumbria tool is computationally efficient and can extract a single Test Reference Year and 2 Design Reference Years from 3000 years of raw data in less than 6 minutes on a typical modern PC. It uses an established ISO method for generating Test Reference Year data and an alternative method of constructing future Design Reference data is proposed