11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
[ACG34-P02] Regional climate change induced impacts of the heating and cooling demands of urban buildings
Keywords:Central/Eastern Europe, temperature, climate projection, energy supply
Due to the global population increase, energy demand is also continuously increasing. Therefore, in order to mitigate global warming and to keep a sustainable future path, energy efficiency needs to be improved, and overall, a reduction of energy consumption is one of the most important goals. According to European surveys, buildings contribute for almost 40% of energy consumption in Europe. The energy consumption of buildings clearly depends on the outdoor air temperature, so it is essential to investigate this relationship for the past, and to analyse possible regional changes due to projected global warming. For this purpose, detected and simulated time series of mean temperatures are used for Hungary, located in the Carpathian basin in Central/Eastern Europe. For instance, in the case of extremely cold and warm days, a warming of 1.9 °C and 2.2 °C can be detected, respectively, in the past century in Budapest (the capital of Hungary). In addition to these detected changes in the tails of temperature distribution, the future changes are also evaluated on the basis of the temperature outputs of RegCM regional climate model simualtions (driven by the HadGEM global climate model) for the late 21st century compared to the late 20th century. In general, projected warming will imply more energy demands for cooling and less for heating, however, it is important to quantify these projected changes in finer scales. So in order to provide input for urban architecture standards, a detailed analysis is carried out for two different scenarios (RCP8.5 and RCP4.5), thus urban planning can use our results.