Abstract
Deadly heat waves are increasing with climate change. Public forecasts and warnings are a primary public health strategy for dealing with such extreme weather events; however, temperatures can vary widely within the administrative units used to issue warnings, particularly across urban landscapes. The emergence of more frequent and widely distributed sources of urban temperature data provide the opportunity to investigate the specificity of the current National Weather Service (NWS) warnings and to improve their accuracy and precision. In this work, temperatures from distributed public weather stations, NWS heat advisories and warnings, and land surface temperature imagery throughout two large metropolitan areas, Atlanta and Chicago, during the 2006–2012 summers are considered. We investigate the spatial variability of hazardous temperatures and their agreement against NWS advisories. Second, we examine the potential for thermal imagery to replicate National Weather Service heat warnings. Observations from weather stations exhibit varying degrees of agreement with NWS advisories. The level of agreement varied by station and was not found to be associated with the station’s proximate land cover. Air temperatures estimated from satellite imagery correspond with NWS Advisory status regionally and may enable creating more refined public warnings regarding hazardous temperatures and protective actions
Highlights
The potential for future extreme heat events that pose danger to human health is increasing with global climate change
Among records from the airport and Weather Underground weather stations from May– September 2006–2012 there are 26,943 and 70,312 valid station-day data records in total for Atlanta and Chicago, respectively, and 1,172 and 1,499 station days were marked as heat wave days
The results suggest that the National Weather Service (NWS)-issued Heat Advisories in Chicago covered many instances when hazardous conditions were never reached at stations, and in Atlanta the Advisories were more likely to miss instances of hazardous conditions at specific locations
Summary
The potential for future extreme heat events that pose danger to human health is increasing with global climate change. As Hansen and colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies put it, we have been loading the climate dice for the last 30 years, increasing the likelihood of meteorological events that used to occur once ever hundred years [1]. The frequency, duration, areal coverage, and intensity of heat waves are expected to increase for most populated places because of global climate change [2, 3]. Such events have caused major episodic mortality, including an estimated
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