Description
Extreme heat exerts profound economic strains, notably increasing energy costs due to higher cooling demands and affecting agriculture with reduced crop yields and livestock productivity. Healthcare costs climb with the rise in heat-related illnesses. Infrastructure sustains damage, requiring expensive repairs, and labor productivity declines, especially in outdoor sectors. Additionally, tourism suffers as travelers avoid heat-stricken areas.The extreme heat product identifies areas across the globe where extreme heat events have posed risks to human life, and use standard quantitative metrics for capturing thermal stress.
Technical Description
The Extreme Heat - Human Risk Historical Baseline product captures the recent near-historical risk of extreme heat events across the globe using well-established standardized thermal indices as it pertains to risk to human life. This product provides insight into the frequency of extreme heat actuals across the globe in a 30-year time period from 1992-2021. The maximum daily heat index is used in this calculation.
This extreme heat product seeks to identify areas across the globe where historically observed extreme heat events have posed risks to human life, and use standard quantitative metrics for capturing thermal stress, going beyond just air temperature. This product can be used to assess the frequency of extreme heat at different locations, or to identify relative risk across different regions at a single time horizon.
This dataset contains the following fields:
- extreme_heat_frequency: Frequencies of extreme heat occurrence at pixel locations over the historical baseline used for calculation. This looks at the frequencies of extreme heat occurrence at pixel locations over the period of record used for calculation. For instance, a value of 0.5 would indicate that half of the days were under extreme heat conditions for that location. This is a value between 0.0 and 1.0.
- extreme_heat_risk_class: The extreme heat 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_heat_frequency field, exclusive of '0' values.