Description
The impacts of extreme cold encompass a broad spectrum of challenges, from skyrocketing heating demands that strain energy supplies and inflate costs, to severe disruptions in transportation that impair supply chains and productivity across sectors. Agriculture suffers due to crop damage and increased livestock care costs, infrastructure faces the dual threats of freeze-induced damage and elevated maintenance expenses, retail and service industries experience downturns in consumer activity. The historical extreme cold risk product captures the historical risks of extreme cold events across the globe using well-established standardized thermal indices that combine wind-chill and air temperature.
Technical Description
The Extreme Cold Historical Risk Product captures the recent near-historical risk of extreme cold events across the globe using well-established standardized thermal indices. This product, version 1.0, uses wind chill (WC) calculations over historical climate reanalysis data to capture the risk from extreme cold events. The WC is calculated using the 10-meter wind speed and 2-meter air temperature, and represents an adjusted air temperature which accounts for convection effects from the wind. Historical wind chill values are compared against known hazardous thresholds to identify the risk profile across the globe.
This dataset contains the following fields:
- extreme_cold_frequency: Frequencies of extreme cold occurrence at pixel locations over the baseline time period. This looks at the frequencies of extreme cold occurrence at pixel locations over the historical baseline period of record used for calculation. For instance, a value of 0.5 would indicate that half of the days were under extreme cold conditions for that location. This is a value between 0.0 and 1.0.
- extreme_cold_risk_class: The extreme cold risk classification for each value. Values are integers from 1 to 5 representing the following classes: Very Low Risk (1), Low Risk (2), Moderate Risk (3), High Risk (4), and Very High Risk (5). Values are categorized using the 44th, 67th, 84th, and 94th percentiles of the extreme_cold_frequency field, exclusive of '0' values.