Building climate zones of major marine islands in China defined using two-stage zoning method and clustering analysis

The current scheme of building climate zones in China generally assumes that building climate zones of island cities are identical to adjacent land stations.Consequently,building design strategies for island buildings usually refer to those developed for inland cities.This approach has to some extent hindered the energy-saving design and green development of island buildings in China.This research takes a first step on this issue by defining the building climate zones of 36 marine islands over China marine area using two-stage zoning methodology adopted by current building climate zoning standard(GB50178-1993).The meteorological data used for analysis was obtained from the National Climate Center of China over the 30-year period from 1985 to 2014.As comparison,40 coastal stations which are adjacent to the inves-tigated marine islands were also included in this study.Subsequently a more obiective techni-que-cluster analysis was operated as an effective supplement to discover the climate characteristics among different observations.The results of both methodologies consistentlyshow that among the 36 islands investigated,the majority of islands located in northern and eastern marine area belong to the same climate zones as their adjacent coastal cities.Howev-er,island cities in southern marine area cannot be assigned to any current climate zone,which was demonstrated by its distinctive climate features different from any other sites investi-gated through cluster analysis as well as different energy use patterns.Thus a new zone was defined to supplement the current building climate zoning scheme to cover marine area of China.

Can the ASHRAE Standard 169 zoning method be applied to country-level energy-efficient building design in China?

In current building thermal climate design zones of China,the zoning indicators only include temperature elements without considering the regional difference of air humidity.Therefore,building thermal design strategies in continental climate zone with low relative humidity and marine climate zone with high relative humidity cannot be distinguished by the current building thermal zoning standards.ASHRAE Standard 169 proposes dual definitions for moisture and thermal climate zones,and this method can be extended to the world,including the so-called“China Climate Zones Map”.However,the moisture climate zoning criterion is unsuitable for China’s climate characteristics after climate analysis and building performance evaluation.In present work,a novel building moisture climate zoning method is proposed.The bioclimatic chart was utilized for extracting the outline of building climate through the Gaussian KDE method.Hence,the building moisture climate was classified,the zoning indicator was obtained,and a country-level climate zones map for China was established.The results indicated that the global information matrix served as a helpful guide and reference for planning at the national level.Annual precipitation could be used as a zoning indicator to accurately reflect the regional differences of building moisture climate in China.The approach can provide new thoughts for improving the climate zoning system in current energy-efficient building design standards of China to assist the ultra-low energy consumption target.