Abstract
Heatwaves represent a significant natural hazard in Australia, arguably more hazardous to human life than bushfires, tropical cyclones and floods. In the 2008/2009 summer, for example, many more lives were lost to heatwaves than to that summer’s bushfires which were among the worst in the history of the Australian nation. For many years, these other forms of natural disaster have received much greater public attention than heatwaves, although there are some signs of change. We propose a new index, called the excess heat factor (EHF) for use in Australian heatwave monitoring and forecasting. The index is based on a three-day-averaged daily mean temperature (DMT), and is intended to capture heatwave intensity as it applies to human health outcomes, although its usefulness is likely to be much broader and with potential for international applicability. The index is described and placed in a climatological context in order to derive heatwave severity. Heatwave severity, as characterised by the climatological distribution of heatwave intensity, has been used to normalise the climatological variation in heatwave intensity range across Australia. This methodology was used to introduce a pilot national heatwave forecasting service for Australia during the 2013/2014 summer. Some results on the performance of the service are presented.
Highlights
Despite heatwaves being one of the most common natural hazards experienced across the Australian community, they remain imprecisely defined events with little understood varied impacts across different community sectors
The location-specific heatwave methodology utilised establishes a baseline for the characteristics of heatwave severity across Australia
Our interpretation of heatwave severity relies upon an expected local adaptation to low-intensity heatwaves which are frequently experienced, leading us to nominate the 85th percentile of all heatwaves in the climate record as a representative point at which we consider heatwaves to be no longer of low intensity
Summary
Despite heatwaves being one of the most common natural hazards experienced across the Australian community, they remain imprecisely defined events with little understood varied impacts across different community sectors. Heatwaves have been responsible for more deaths in Australia, Europe and the United. McMichael et al [6] has estimated that extreme temperatures currently contribute to the deaths of over 1,000 people aged over 65 each year across Australia. The number of heat-related deaths in temperate Australian cities is expected to rise considerably by 2050, as the frequency and intensity of heatwaves is projected to increase under climate change from global warming. Underpinning this view is the building evidence supporting the notion of a warming planet [7,8]
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