HONOLULU, Aug. 4 -- The University of Hawaii issued the following news release:
University of Hawai'i at Manoa atmospheric scientists found that the century-old yardstick used across many industries to estimate air-conditioning and refrigeration energy demand-called cooling degree days-is missing something fundamental.
Published in Nature Communications, the study reports a new, physics-based version of the metric-effective cooling degree days-that captures how temperature and humidity together impact the actual work a cooling system is required to do. Applying it across North America, they found that cooling efficiency has been declining by 2-4% per decade since 1971, and that the old temperature-only metric misjudges how much cooling is...