IES adds bio-climatic analysis to VE Gaia
Software specialist Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) has added bio-climatic analysis features to its VE-Gaia climate-assessment tools. Bio-climatic analysis uses an understanding of climate and environment to inform building-design strategy. Focused on low-energy and passive strategies, this tool uses a user-selected weather data file to derive an extensive set of design suggestions for urban layout and built form.
A bio-climatic analysis can assess the implications of future predicted weather data to design a sustainable building that takes long-term climate-change impacts into account. VE-Gaia includes a rainfall database of 2000 locations worldwide, which is important for climate analysis and usually unavailable in weather files.
Don McLean, CEO of IES, explains, ‘To be truly sustainable, a building needs to last in excess of a hundred years, and sustainability design regulations and sustainability rating systems only require you to design against weather data that represents at best the next decade or so. Sustainable designs really need to make some assessment of the impact of climate change on determining built-form suitability for the long term.’
