Building performance, climatic variables, and indices: identification of correlations for social housing across the Mexican territory

Building energy codes rely on climate zoning to establish regional requirements and benchmarks for building performance. Nevertheless, there is neither an accepted methodology for this purpose nor a scientific agreement when considering variables that provide quantitative results. This paper explores the relationships between the environmental performance of a free-running housing prototype, simulated in 240 locations across the Mexican territory, and climatic variables :latitude, altitude, and diurnal range, as well as the climatic indices of continentality, oceanity, and aridity. Correlations were found and analysed through statistical methods to define the significance of the selected variables to be used to predict the effectiveness of a free-running dwelling. The simulation outputs were processed as the percentage of time in comfort and overheating/overcooling hours. The results proved that latitude and altitude had a stronger correlation than the diurnal range and the climatic indices which showed similar but inferior effect sizes for all cases. None of the obtained correlation effect sizes reached a strong significative value. The results demonstrate that the highest correlation values were from the variables of Latitude and Altitude, with both effect sizes within the moderate correlation range, therefore, these variables can be used as guidelines in the prediction of a general trend when predicting thermal comfort in free-running buildings.