Abstract
Climate change (CC) has an impact on freeze-thaw degradation in historical buildings. The changing risk is not uniform over Europe according to climate-based analyses (i.e. only using climate data). Though, degradation risks are highly affected by building parameters (e.g. wall composition, material properties...). Response-based analyses (i.e. using hygrothermal simulation results) account for building parameters, and are more detailed. Nonetheless, they are not state-of-the-art for large domains given the high computational cost. Therefore, we compared a climate-based and response-based analysis for 10 locations in Europe and the Mediterranean, focussing on the critical Freeze-Thaw Cycles (FTC) in solid masonry walls. This paper presents the CC impact for 1.780 building parameter variations at each location. The Spearman rank correlation is 0.79 between the absolute values of the climate-based frost-indices (i.e. frost decay exposure index and FTC based on air temperature (FTCair)), and the critical FTC in the brick masonry. The correlation of the change in freeze-thaw risk is weaker (0.33 for FTCair). The error when using a climate-based analysis to represent the CC impact goes up to 100%. Alongside, the climate-based analysis cannot represent the spread of the CC impact between different parameter variations. The climate-based analysis is only suitable as an estimation.
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