Effects of climate change on China building climate demarcation

The building climate demarcation standard currently being used is based on the weather data of 1951-1985, which was issued in 1993. China´s weather has changed significantly with the changes of the global weather and the increase of urban heat island effect. Temperatures in most cities in China have changed much in comparison with the temperature during the years of 1951-1985 and 1986-2008. In order to see the effects of climate change on building climate demarcation, the same parameters and conditions as were previously used have been adopted to classify building climate zones within the recent 30 years of weather data of 1979-2008. The meteorological data used in this paper is from the American National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which is reported to NCDC by meteorological bureaus of different countries and are proved to be reliable. We found that the building climate demarcation boundaries have been moved quite remarkably, and some locations have moved from one zone to adjacent areas of neighboring zones. The regionalization boundary may have shifted with the largest displacement of 1°30´ in latitude. This change has been discovered in every zone, which covers the large or average sized cities. In this paper, we have addressed some suggestions for practical building climate demarcation.