Annual number of Cooling Degree Days (1990-2015 average), version 1.0, Jan. 2019

The dataset presents the annual number of Cooling Degree Days (CDD) in average for the period 1990-2015, for a series of individual European cities from Eurostat's Urban Audit 2011-2014 spatial dataset, based on the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and around 10,000 meteorological stations across Europe.

This dataset has been used in the EEA Report No 22/2018 "Unequal exposure and unequal impacts: social vulnerability to air pollution, noise and extreme temperatures in Europe" (https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/unequal-exposure-and-unequal-impacts/at_download/file), where CDD is defined as the sum of the difference in degrees between 21 °C and the mean temperature over the year, for the days when the mean daily temperature is higher than 21 °C.

The number of CDDs is useful in differentiating between areas based on the need for cooling homes or workplaces. As a measurement designed to quantify the demand for energy needed to cool a building in order to keep it at a comfortable temperature, it is relevant to issues of thermal comfort and energy affordability.