The responsiveness of buildings to prevailing local climate plays an important role if the dual aspects of occupant comfort and low energy demand are to be met. This study takes as example the State of Kerala in India where the Government - as part of the project titled “Livelihood Inclusion and Financial Empowerment (LIFE) mission” - plans to build more than 750, 000 houses across the State, using a uniform design, irrespective of the location or climate. A previous study has identified regions with different climatic characteristics within Kerala using a method based on adaptive thermal comfort model. This study aims to understand how the building design influences occupant comfort in the different adaptive climate zones by performing an uncertainty analysis on the output metrics. The thermal comfort was assessed based on the hours requiring heating/cooling while visual comfort was assessed based on the Useful Daylight Illuminance metric. A sensitivity analysis was also carried out to identify design parameters that influence occupant comfort. The results of this study will serve as a reference for practitioners during the early stages of design to achieve thermal and visual comfort for high performance residential buildings.

Classification of climate zones for building design and energy assessment purposes plays a vital role in aiding building engineers and architects in achieving energy efficiency in buildings using building performance simulation. Previous studies highlighted the need for climate assessments at higher resolutions for the purpose of climate classification but failed to infer the resolution requirement. In this study, climate zones of Kerala (one of the 29 States in India) are defined and delineated with climate data from grid resolutions of 10, 15, 20 and 25 km. The delineated zones are then assessed by comparing them with the thermal performance of a building representative of building typology of Kerala to identify the grid resolution necessary for zone delineation.