Suchergebnisse

The recast of the energy performance of buildings directive stipulates that by 2020 all new buildings should reach nearly zero energy levels (2019 for buildings owned or occupied by public authorities). Therefore technicians involved in the design, conception and approval of such buildings should be able to understand and apply nearly zero energy buildings (nZEB) concepts both towards new buildings and the refurbishment of existing ones. However the number of architects and engineers that are able to deal with new technologies and standards might not be adequate to the increasing market demand. Additionally, at European Union (EU) level there are differences in commitment to the EU targets and the construction of nZEB. In this context, arose the SouthZEB project, that is an Intelligent Energy Europe (IEE) funded project, that aims to fill this gap and address the need to develop training schemes to professionals involved in nZEB building process, transferring successful practices and knowledge from front runners to target Southern EU countries that are less advanced in this area. This paper presents the project aims and ...

Abstract. The advances in satellite technology in recent years have made feasible the acquisition of high-resolution information on the Earth's surface. Examples of such information include elevation and land use, which have become more detailed. Including this information in numerical atmospheric models can improve their results in simulating lower boundary forced events, by providing detailed information on their characteristics. Consequently, this work aims to study the sensitivity of the weather research and forecast (WRF) model to different topography as well as land-use simulations in an extreme precipitation event. The test case focused on a topographically driven precipitation event over the island of Madeira, which triggered flash floods and mudslides in the southern parts of the island. Difference fields between simulations were computed, showing that the change in the data sets produced statistically significant changes to the flow, the planetary boundary layer structure and precipitation patterns. Moreover, model results show an improvement in model skill in the windward region for precipitation and in the leeward region for wind, in spite of the non-significant enhancement in the overall results with higher-resolution data sets of topography and land use.