Hassan, Shamin Ara "Organization and Presentation of Climatic Information for Building Design with Particular Reference to Design for Thermal Comfort"

Climate affects almost all building design, appearing to be one of the significant issues that needs to be considered in today's energy conscious building design practice. Though much detailed climatic information is available from meteorological sources, use of such information has not been seen to be a normal part of a building designer's (say, architect's or engineer's) work. There seems to be a gap between the need and the availability of suitable information.

The reason for such indifference of building designers towards incorporating climatic information in various decision-making areas can be attributed to two principal factors. Firstly, many designers are not sufficiently aware of the various climatic effects on buildings and may not know how to consider climate in various design problem-solving activities. Secondly, relevant climatic information is not available to designers according to their needs. Due to the wide scope of building design, the volume of information that is already handled by building design professionals is vast and "information overload" tends to be a common problem. In such situations building designers would allow for climatic effects in building design practice only if relevant information is identified and appropriately presented according to their needs.

In each design problem-solving area the decision-making process moves from broad and general to detailed and specific design stages. Therefore, climatic information should be presented to accord to the various stages of the design processes, so that information can be easily retrieved for immediate needs.

This thesis investigates the overall climatic information requirements of building designers with particular reference to design for thermal comfort in buildings. Various types of climatic information that may be required by building designers, while designing the thermal environments of buildings, have been identified with respect to four climatic elements, viz, solar radiation, air temperature, humidity and wind. Methods by which needed information may be presented for design use have been discussed and examples have been cited of various forms used by different workers. Suggestions are made as to which methods should be preferred in various circumstances.

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This document was last modified on February 20, 2001.