A high temporal resolution global gridded dataset of human thermal stress metrics

Abstract

The human thermal stress indices and datasets are vital for promoting public health and reducing negative environmental impacts as global climate change and extreme meteorological events increase. The current thermal indices generally use an instantaneous or average value to describe thermal stress which cannot reflect the distribution of thermal comfort conditions over time, and there are no global-scale thermal stress datasets with both 0.1° or higher spatial resolution and hourly temporal resolution available yet. A novel human thermal metric, Thermal Stress Duration (TSD), is proposed to represent the accumulative time of different thermal stress levels within a certain period. A high temporal resolution global gridded dataset of human thermal stress metrics (HiGTS) is presented, which consists of hourly gridded maps of Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), Universal Thermal Stress (UTS), and daily TSD at 0.1° × 0.1° spatial resolution over the global land surface, spanning from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2023.