Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
I think you are putting too much faith in GCM models used to model climate change. Although all of them agree that global temperatures will rise, they can vary substantially and even contradict one other at the regional level. Moreover, the reason you hear more about changes in temperatures is that there's much less consensus on what would happen to humidity and cloud cover, and as for wind, that depends on so many local factors I don't believe it's possible to project changes 30 years in the future.
This is not a rant against using GCM results to "morph" an existing weather file into a future year file. That's not hard to do and either of the resources mentioned above should work for you. However, this is a word of caution to take these "morphed" weather files with a dose of salt and accept that they are projections (morphing) built on top of projections (GCM results).
The other thing that puzzles me is that there's not just one IPCC projection, but at least four for different policy/economic scenarios (A1FI, B1, etc.). Are people now using the worst case, best case, etc. ? I also wish someone would take a look at the trends in the historical weather as another bellwether for climate change. (full disclosure - I was a member of the IPCC Working Group II)
