CliMA advances climate modeling and applied climate analytics to support engineering, infrastructure planning, and climate-informed design. The Climate Design Conditions Platform translates complex climate datasets into practical outputs that engineers and planners can use in real-world design workflows. By integrating observational climate records with modeled projections, the platform helps bridge the gap between climate science and applied engineering decision-making. Its goal is to make reliable climate design information more accessible for professionals responsible for infrastructure resilience and long-term planning.
The Climate Design Tools web application generates climate design-condition datasets, meteorological year files, and climate visualizations for selected cities. Users can compute engineering design values using established standards such as ASHRAE and the Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC), while also downloading meteorological datasets including Typical Meteorological Year (TMY), Actual Meteorological Year (AMY), and Future Typical Meteorological Year (FTMY) files. In addition to downloadable datasets, the platform provides visualizations and climate summaries that help users explore trends in temperature, precipitation, wind patterns, and other environmental variables through charts, heatmaps, and statistical summaries. These outputs allow users to compare observed climate conditions with projected future scenarios derived from climate model simulations.
The platform is designed primarily for engineers, architects, infrastructure planners, researchers, and policy stakeholders working with climate-informed design and analysis. These users often require standardized climate design data to support building design, infrastructure development, and environmental planning decisions. Municipal planners and decision-makers may also use the platform to better understand climate conditions and potential future changes affecting their regions. By providing accessible design-condition outputs and climate summaries, the tool supports a wide range of professional and research applications.
This application integrates observational climate datasets sourced from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) with climate-model output from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). Observational records provide the historical foundation used to compute standard design-condition statistics, while model output enables analysis of projected climate conditions. Meteorological year datasets are generated using established statistical approaches such as the Sandia Method, which identifies representative months within historical climate records to construct typical meteorological years. Future climate summaries presented in the application are derived using the HadGEM-GC31-MM Earth system model under the high-emissions SSP5-8.5 scenario, enabling users to explore potential mid-century climate conditions alongside historical observations.
The Climate Design Conditions Platform is part of a broader set of tools developed through the Climate Modeling Alliance. One related tool is the CliDApp4Rhino plugin, which enables users to download meteorological weather files for use directly within Rhino-based design workflows. This integration allows climate data produced by the platform to be incorporated into modeling and simulation environments commonly used in engineering and architectural design.