Nowadays, subjects such as eco-design requirements, product rating or code\r\ncompliance with regard to energy efficiency are expanding towards a pan-European level.\r\nThis leads to the necessity of defining zones within the European region, which share\r\ncommon climatic characteristics and will further facilitate the quick estimation of building\r\nenergy performance. Towards this direction stands the current paper; it presents an approach\r\nfor defining climatic zones in Europe on the basis of the amount of heating and cooling\r\ndegree days. It is applied for the climate classification of selected European cities and is\r\ncompared with the conventional scheme based solely on heating degree days. Since the\r\napproach is orientated mainly towards the assessment of building energy performance, its\r\noutcomes are evaluated with regard to the actual heating and cooling energy needs of a\r\nreference building unit with office use located in representative cities of the proposed\r\nclimatic zones and facing the four cardinal orientations. The classification of climatic\r\nzones on the basis of both heating and cooling degree days leads to more realistic results,\r\nsince nowadays cooling needs form a substantial part of the energy balance of the building,\r\nespecially in the Mediterranean regions.
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