Arup and Argos Analytics announce WeatherShift™

SAN FRANCISCO, May 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Arup, a multidisciplinary engineering and consulting firm with a reputation for delivering innovative and sustainable designs, announced today it has partnered with Argos Analytics, LLC to develop WeatherShift™, a tool that generates future climate weather data for 50 cities for simulating building and urban performance based on climate simulations run for the recent IPCC Fifth Assessment.

Energy use, water stress, and the comfort conditions of buildings and their urban environments throughout the world will be impacted as the average global temperature increases due to climate change, resulting in significant shifts in weather patterns. With WeatherShift™ cities and building owners in all 50 cities will be able, for the first time, to quantitatively assess the impact of climate change on their place making. Additionally, designers will be able to further develop strategies through which buildings can be readied to respond to the impacts and maintain their core service.

"We are very excited about how we can use WeatherShift™ to benefit our projects and clients," said Cole Roberts, associate principal at Arup. "Designs that have had to use historic data can now be complemented by future data derived from multiple global climate models."

The proprietary tool will also be utilized to minimize building owner's risk due to increased operational costs and will help owners make better informed investment decisions during the initial design phases on large masterplanning and infrastructure projects.

"This is a perfect example of how climate science pairing with practice can improve our cities and communities" said William Collins, chief technical officer of Argos Analytics and a lead author for both the IPCC Fourth and Fifth Assessments.

To generate the climate calibrated weather files produced by WeatherShift™, a time series adjustment or 'morphing' technique was used to generate hourly 8760 data weather files. The adjustments were based on climate shift factor distributions contained in the Argos Analytics ClimateDelta™ dataset created by analyzing an ensemble of global climate model outputs using the Argos Analytics TRACE™ system. The current version of WeatherShift™ adjusts weather data for years 2046–2065 and 2081-2100 at user defined points on the distributions for both the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 emissions scenarios.

WeatherShift™ represents Arup's commitment to sustainability, resiliency, and learning. It is just one of over 350 R&D projects funded by Arup in the past year. The work builds on past successful work including the C40 Climate Action in Megacities Report Volume 2.0, the book Two Degrees – Our Built Environment and the Changing Climate, and work for the UKMet office on future climate.

For further information please contact:

Rebecca Maloney, LEED AP, CPSM
Arup
e [email protected]
m +1 617 412-6632

Robert Dickinson
Argos Analytics
e [email protected]
t +1 650 281-5718

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SOURCE Arup