An Analytical Approach to the Impact of Heat Waves on Buildings and Their Occupants

Extreme weather events are expected to become more intense and more frequent, and lead to increases in heat related mortality. Unfortunately, there is no set of agreed heat wave time series to test new buildings or complete building stocks against. In this work, we attempt to solve this by finding analytical relationships between heat waves and increases in internal temperature for 25 monitored dwellings. The result is a methodology that allows the forecasting of the effect of extreme events on buildings with almost no computational effort. Extrapolating the results to the whole UK domestic stock indicates that, for example, a heat wave of three days with a maximum amplitude of 5 kelvin above the situation prior to the heat wave will result on an increment in internal temperature of 1.5 kelvin or more for 43.3% of dwellings and a rise of 2 kelvin or more in 3.5% of the dwellings by the third day of the heat wave.