Climate strongly influences global wildfire activity, and recent wildfire surges may signal fire weather-induced pyrogeographic shifts. Here we use three daily global climate data sets and three fire danger indices to develop a simple annual metric of fire weather season length, and map spatio-temporal trends from 1979 to 2013. We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km2 (25.3%) of the Earth's vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean fire weather season length. We also show a doubling (108.1% increase) of global burnable area affected by long fire weather seasons (>1.0 σ above the historical mean) and an increased global frequency of long fire weather seasons across 62.4 million km2 (53.4%) during the second half of the study period. If these fire weather changes are coupled with ignition sources and available fuel, they could markedly impact global ecosystems, societies, economies and climate.

Climate-induced variations in global wildfire danger from 1979-2013

ライブラリー Annual Energy Outlook 2000

Over the past decades, detailed individual building energy models (BEM) on the one side and regional and country-level building stock models on the other side have become established modes of analysis for building designers and energy policy makers, respectively. More recently, these two toolsets have begun to merge into hybrid methods that are meant to analyze the energy performance of neighborhoods, i.e. several dozens to thousands of buildings. This paper reviews emerging simulation methods and implementation workflows for such bottom-up urban building energy models (UBEM). Simulation input organization, thermal model generation and execution, as well as result validation, are discussed successively and an outlook for future developments is presented.

Urban building energy modeling – A review of a nascent field

https://escholarship.org/content/qt6xt3v0zk/qt6xt3v0zk.pdf?t=p0wsl4

Advances in research and applications of energy-related occupant behavior in buildings ☆

https://escholarship.org/content/qt36z701vc/qt36z701vc.pdf?t=p8gzb9

IEA EBC Annex 66: Definition and simulation of occupant behavior in buildings

A framework for quantifying the impact of occupant behavior on energy savings of energy conservation measures

Commercial Building Energy Saver: An energy retrofit analysis toolkit

Buildings consume more than one-third of the world’s primary energy. Reducing energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions in the buildings sector through energy conservation and efficiency improvements constitutes a key strategy for achieving global energy and environmental goals. Building performance simulation has been increasingly used as a tool for designing, operating and retrofitting buildings to save energy and utility costs. However, opportunities remain for researchers, software developers, practitioners and policymakers to maximize the value of building performance simulation in the design and operation of low energy buildings and communities that leverage interdisciplinary approaches to integrate humans, buildings, and the power grid at a large scale. This paper presents ten challenges that highlight some of the most important issues in building performance simulation, covering the full building life cycle and a wide range of modeling scales. The formulation and discussion of each challenge aims to provide insights into the state-of-the-art and future research opportunities for each topic, and to inspire new questions from young researchers in this field.

/pdf/building-simulation-ten-challenges-3a9txgfq65.pdf

Building simulation: Ten challenges

https://escholarship.org/content/qt9qv7k95k/qt9qv7k95k.pdf?t=n93zk6

Stochastic Modeling of Overtime Occupancy and Its Application in Building Energy Simulation and Calibration

https://escholarship.org/content/qt8hk0q62r/qt8hk0q62r.pdf?t=p0lnjg

Kaiyu Sun

Papers

A framework for quantifying the impact of occupant behavior on energy savings of energy conservation measures

Commercial Building Energy Saver: An energy retrofit analysis toolkit

Building simulation: Ten challenges

Stochastic Modeling of Overtime Occupancy and Its Application in Building Energy Simulation and Calibration

A pattern-based automated approach to building energy model calibration