Abstract
Thermal stress poses a major public health threat in a warming world, especially to disadvantaged communities. At the population group level, human thermal stress is heavily affected by landscape heterogeneities such as terrain, surface water, and vegetation. High-spatial-resolution thermal-stress indices, containing more detailed spatial information, are greatly needed to characterize the spatial pattern of thermal stress to enable a better understanding of its impacts on public health, tourism, and study and work performance. Here, we present a 0.1° × 0.1° gridded dataset of multiple thermal stress indices derived from the newly available ECMWF ERA5-Land and ERA5 reanalysis products over South and East Asia from 1981 to 2019. This high-spatial-resolution database of human thermal stress indices over South and East Asia (HiTiSEA), which contains the daily mean, maximum, and minimum values of UTCI, MRT, and eight other widely adopted indices, is suitable for both indoor and outdoor applications and allows researchers and practitioners to investigate the spatial and temporal evolution of human thermal stress and its impacts on densely populated regions over South and East Asia at a finer scale.
Highlights
Background & SummaryDue to the unprecedented scale of climate change, extreme temperature events have become more intense and frequent in many parts of the world over the past few decades[1,2,3]
High-spatial-resolution thermal-stress indices, containing more detailed spatial information, are greatly needed to characterize the spatial pattern of thermal stress to enable a better understanding of its impacts on public health, tourism, and study and work performance
Some of them are based on the principles of human thermal exchange, while others are based on empirical relationships obtained by examining human responses to various environmental factors
Summary
Due to the unprecedented scale of climate change, extreme temperature events have become more intense and frequent in many parts of the world over the past few decades[1,2,3]. Using the key variables from ERA5-Land reanalysis, along with direct solar radiation from ERA5, this paper presents a higher-spatial-resolution (0.1° × 0.1°) gridded dataset with multiple thermal-stress indices This newly developed dataset, called the High-spatial-resolution Thermal-stress Indices over South and East Asia (HiTiSEA), contains daily maximum, minimum, and mean values of the indoor and outdoor UTCI (including shaded and unshaded outdoor environments), as well as the mean radiant temperature (MRT) and eight other widely used empirical indices, as listed, from 1981 to 2019 for the area of South and East Asia, a region making up more than half of the world’s population, many of which are vulnerable to the impacts of extreme thermal stress. This newly developed dataset can help researchers estimate the energy demand required to meet residential heating or cooling needs, especially in India, Bangladesh, and China, where large gaps exist[20]
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