Description
This is a projection dataset for global land areas capturing the future risk from extreme heat in decadal time steps out to 2090 using the humidity-adjusted Heat Index for the SSP5-8.5 scenario.
Technical Description
The global Extreme Heat Risk Projection products capture projected risk of extreme heat across the globe using well-established thermal stress metrics. These risk maps reflect the future risk from extreme heat in global land regions at decadal time steps for Shared Socioeconomic Pathway SSP5-8.5. These maps use future CMIP6-based projections of temperature and humidity to calculate likely changes to extreme heat conditions into the future. The spatial scale for this dataset is 11 km/pixel and data is available for the years 2020 - 2090 (where windows centered around the year are used to calculate the projected extreme heat conditions). Extreme heat frequencies (between 0.0-1.0) are provided for the combinations of SSP and time horizon.
This dataset contains the following fields:
- extreme_heat_frequency: Frequencies of extreme heat occurrence at pixel locations over the historical period of record used for calculation. Technically unitless but represents counts of extreme heat occurrences divided by the total number of data points. For instance, a 0.5 score for 2050 would indicate that half of the days between 2045 and 2055 were over extreme heat conditions for that location. In other words, there is a 50% probability that the location would be in extreme heat conditions on any given day in that decade.