Case Study: Westwood Hills Nature Center

Woman walking into nature center building

 

Climate concerns and planning for change

The Nature Center desired a net-zero energy building, even in a changing climate. HGA's main concern was how to achieve this goal during times of extreme temperatures. Extreme cold is all-too-common in Minnesota's historical climate, but in the future extreme heat is likely to become a concern as well.

HGA's design team used both descriptive and quantitative data in the project: they shared long-term climate trends to demonstrate the project’s risks and design challenges, and used computer model projections to explore how their design would withstand extreme heat. They also considered how climate trends could affect their energy systems — snowfall on the roof, for example, can reduce the efficiency of solar panels.

Understanding climate risk

When designing buildings, architects use "TMY" files, which stands for "Typical Meteorological Year," or the average weather for every hour in a year (Hall, 1978). Usually architects get this information from historical climate data, or observations of weather taken over 15-30 years and averaged together. But to design for a future climate, HGA's design team needed future TMY files, which they purchased from WeatherShift, a private company that sells statistically downscaled projections (Belcher et al., 2005; Dickinson and Brannon, 2016; Troup and Fannon, 2016).

Design team members didn't just use projections that they purchased from a company - they also fostered relationships with the scientific community. They invited Dr. Mark Seeley (University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership) to meet with their statff and consulted with Dr. Kenny Blumenfeld (Minnesota Department of Natural Resources) on the benefits of projection data downscaling methodologies. These relationships helped HGA understand the importance of engaging directly with the climate science community to understand what projections may mean for design outcomes. 

Sustaining adaptation efforts

Looking forward, HGA continues to use future climate data to inform design projects across the country, and is working to train more staff to use projection data in design. HGA, MCAP and the Center for Sustainable Building Research are collaborating to ensure that all architects and engineers working on Minnesota-based projects will soon have access to high resolution, dynamically downscaled TMY files from CMIP6, the latest generation of Global Climate Models.

Engaging with stakeholders

The City of St. Louis Park had ultimate decision-making power on the project, but wanted to integrate input from a variety of stakeholders and partners, including Nature Center staff and local community members. This would ensure that the center was designed with user needs in mind. The center invited key stakeholders to a climate resilience workshop early on, sharing information about future local climate conditions and discussing implications for the City and the project. 

Taking action

Because HGA had in-house expertise and could incorporate future climate data into existing design tools, the future climate data added no additional cost to the project aside from the cost of the files themselves. Nature Center management, meanwhile, made some design tradeoffs to achieve their goal of a net-zero design in a changing climate. For example, they opted to make some of their spaces smaller to reduce construction costs, prioritizing the building's energy performance over building larger classrooms.

A woman and her child interact with staff at the westwood hills nature center

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Citations

Hall, et al., 1978. Generation of a typical meteorological year.

HGA, 2024. Design Team Interview.

Belcher, et al., 2005. Constructing design weather data.

Dickinson and Brannon, 2016. Generating future weather files.

Troup and Fannon, 2016. Morphing future weather data.

Photos: © Corey Gaffer

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