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From Days to Hours: Evaluating Granularity of Weather Data for Building Physics Analysis

Abstract

Accurate building physics evaluations require hourly climate data for simulating heat and moisture transfer. However, most future climate model outputs are available at a daily resolution due to storage limitations and the downscaling methods used to correct biases in global and regional climate models. This study examines whether simple statistical approaches can effectively convert daily data into hourly values for hygrothermal simulations. To assess the impact of disaggregation, a representative construction is defined, and historical observations, available at both daily and hourly resolutions are used. The results indicate that the method is simple yet effective for certain hygrothermal analyses. However, for damage mechanisms driven by high-intensity events or sensitive to unresolved sub-daily variability near critical thresholds, basic disaggregation techniques may be inadequate without additional processing to restore sub-daily fluctuations.
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Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Community / Architecture, Materials and Structures

Year

2026

Published in

IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (EES)

ISSN

1755-1307

Volume

1615

Page(s)

1 - 11

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository