Excessive heat is often called the ‘silent killer’ among extreme weather events. Many heat-related deaths go unreported because of the indirect pathway between environment stress and the cause of death – cardiac arrest, for example. Still, direct deaths due to heatstroke range from 250 to 950 per year over the past decade. Through several public-health related projects, we are compiling metrics of excessive heat over the conterminous U.S. using meteorological reanalysis data from the North American Land Data Assimilation System Stage-2 (NLDAS-2). These metrics include daily maximum air temperature, daily maximum Heat Index, and a new variable that reflects the balance of heat stress and heat relief over daily or longer periods. In this seminar I will discuss these data sets and use them to illustrate differences in patterns of heat between two recent summers U.S. Finally, I will use the metrics of excessive heat to illustrate the varying nature of three recent southeastern heat waves.
Past Brown Bag Abstracts
Excessive heat is often called the ‘silent killer’ among extreme weather events. Many heat-related deaths go unreported because of the indirect pathway between environment stress and the cause of death – cardiac arrest, for example. Still, direct deaths due to heatstroke range from 250 to 950 per year over the past decade. Through several public-health related projects, we are compiling metrics of excessive heat over the conterminous U.S. using meteorological reanalysis data from the North American Land Data Assimilation System Stage-2 (NLDAS-2). These metrics include daily maximum air temperature, daily maximum Heat Index, and a new variable that reflects the balance of heat stress and heat relief over daily or longer periods. In this seminar I will discuss these data sets and use them to illustrate differences in patterns of heat between two recent summers U.S. Finally, I will use the metrics of excessive heat to illustrate the varying nature of three recent southeastern heat waves.