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Abstract: The concern on climate change leads to growing demand for minimization of energy use. As building is one of the largest energy consuming sectors, it is essential to study the impact of climate change on building energy performance. In this regard, building energy simulation software is a useful tool. A set of appropriate typical weather files is one of the key factors towards successful building energy simulation. This paper reports the work of developing a set of weather data files for subtropical Hong Kong, taking into the effect of future climate change. Projected monthly mean climate changes from a selected General Circulation Model for three future periods under two emission scenarios were integrated into an existing typical meteorological year weather file by a morphing method. Through this work, six sets of future weather files for subtropical Hong Kong were produced. A typical office building and a residential flat were modeled using building simulation program EnergyPlus. Hourly building energy simulations were carried out. The simulated results indicate that there will be substantial increase in A/C energy consumption under the impact of future climate change, ranging from 2.6% to 14.3% and from 3.7% to 24% for office building and residential flat, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Building Bio-Climatic Charts are proposed for different climate change scenarios. • Time-varying significance of nine design parameters in this century are provided. • Effectiveness of airtightness will increase up to 329% by the end of this century. • Cooling potentials of natural ventilation will significantly decrease up to 69%. • A holistic passive design can reduce the building annual cooling load by 56.7%. The application of passive design strategies is crucial at the early architectural design stage for building energy use minimization. However, the time-varying effectiveness of passive design strategies in responding to future climate change in hot and humid climates are rather limited in the literature. This paper aims to examine the dynamic effectiveness of passive design strategies for residential buildings in Hong Kong under the context of future climate change. Using the newly developed hourly weather data and adaptive comfort standard model, the dynamic effectiveness of viable passive design strategies for residential buildings are evaluated over time in the 21st century by plotting Givoni building bio-climatic charts (BBCC) and simulation-based sensitivity analyses in a validated EnergyPlus model. Results show that solar protection strategies are still the highly sensitive strategies for building energy performance and the effectiveness of external windows' airtightness is expected to increase up to 329% by the end of this century, whereas the cooling potential of ventilation utilization will significantly decrease over time. When the different combination of sensitive passive design parameters is implemented onto the baseline residential building model for different climate scenarios, the annual and peak cooling load can be reduced up to 56.7% and 64.5%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Future-TMY (F-TMY) and Morphing methodologies are compared in 14 Iberian cities. • Morphing sensitive analysis using 3 different files is performed. • High-quality Morphing and F-TMY have similar climate and BES performances (7%−8%). • F-TMY is representative of the multi-year simulation for BES applications. • Low-quality Morphing leads to average errors between 16% to 20%. In the last decade, building energy simulation (BES) became a central component in building energy systems' design and optimization. For each building location, BES requires one year of hourly weather data. Most buildings are designed to last 50+ years, consequently, the building design phase should include BES with future weather files considering climate change. This paper presents a comparative study of two methods to produce future climate hourly data files for BES: Morphing and typical meteorological year of future climate (F-TMY). The study uses data from a high-resolution (9 km) regional climate atmospheric model simulation of Iberia, spanning 10 years of historical and future hourly data. This study compares both methods by analyzing anomalies in air temperature, and the impact in BES predictions of annual and peak energy consumption for space heating, cooling and ventilation in 4 buildings. Additionally, this study performs a sensitivity analysis of morphing method. The analysis shows that F-TMY is representative of the multi-year simulation for BES applications. A high-quality Morphed TMY weather file has a similar performance compared to F-TMY (average difference: 8% versus 7%). Morphing based on different baseline climates, low-grid resolution and/or outdated climate projections leads to BES average differences of 16%-20%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]