Designing a building such that its interiors may allow for passive survivability and the ability for occupants to shelter in place during an extreme temperature event can be assessed using the standard effective temperature (SET) metric.

Despite evidence of changing climate, in the United States it is still common for building project teams to reference U.S. Climate Normals derived from three consecutive decades of historic data for broad-based climate analyses and to utilize Typical Meteorological Year datasets for building energy modeling exercises.

A building's enclosure and mechanical systems must be designed to confront the weather extremes of its locale. The weather "extremes" can be described in myriad ways using several data.