Performance-based validation of climatic zoning for building energy efficiency applications was published by Applied Energy in 2018 and describes a procedure to validate climatic zoning options, using a new indicator called Mean Percentage of Misclassified Areas. This procedure supported the analysis of multiple buildings in the stock, and also allows the simultaneous use of multiple performance indicators (such as energy for cooling, for heating, for ventilation, thermal comfort). This was the first time an fit-for-purpose indicator was introduced to calculate in a single number the matching between climatic zones and building energy performance. 

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Comparison of three climatic zoning methodologies for building energy efficiency applications was published in the journal  Energy and Buildings in 2017, and compares the results obtained using three widely used climatic zoning methodologies. They were applied to Nicaragua, a small country in Latin America, and results indicate a high level of agreement between the different methodologies, but they also disagree on the appropriate classification of a significant proportion of the country (37% of Nicaragua’s territory). This work was a significant demonstration of the need for quantitative metrics to support the comparison of zoning options, and to allow the identification of potentially misclassified areas in a given zoning proposal.

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Review of methods for climatic zoning for building energy efficiency programs was in the Building and Environment journal in 2017 and brings a wide review of climatic zoning methods, variables and assumptions used in the zoning of 54 countries, which are responsible for 85% of the total primary energy consumption of the world. The study identified that the nature and magnitude of climatic variations are not the main elements in the definition of the number of climatic zones in a country. The number of climatic zones seems to be mainly driven by the expected simplicity of the final climatic zoning, respecting in most cases a maximum of 8 zones independent of the country size and climatic variations. Several methods used for climatic zoning were identified. A total of 19 different variables, techniques and parameters were used in the climatic zoning reviewed in this study, the most frequent being temperature, degree days, altitude, administrative divisions and relative humidity. In spite of the large number of possible approaches, four out of five countries analysed in this study used only up to three variables/techniques/parameters to define their climatic zoning for building energy efficiency programs. This simplicity comes at the cost of ignoring several aspects of climate and building energy performance. The lack of consensus in several aspects of climate zoning in different countries indicated the need for further research in this area, which was a key driver for our work on the development of performance-based climatic zoning.

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