A heat-health watch and warning system with extended season and evolving thresholds
| Autor: | Fateh Chebana, Eric Lavigne, Mahamat Abdelkerim Issa, Taha B. M. J. Ouarda, Céline Campagna, Pierre Gosselin, Pierre Masselot |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
medicine.medical_specialty
Canada Hot Temperature 010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences Climate Population Poison control 01 natural sciences Occupational safety and health 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Heat wave Range (statistics) Methods Medicine Humans 030212 general & internal medicine Mortality education 0105 earth and related environmental sciences education.field_of_study Warning system Warning systems business.industry Public health Public Health Environmental and Occupational Health Northern Hemisphere Quebec Extreme Heat Seasonality medicine.disease Health Climatology Thresholds Seasons Public aspects of medicine RA1-1270 business Research Article |
| Zdroj: | BMC Public Health BMC Public Health, Vol 21, Iss 1, Pp 1-13 (2021) |
| DOI: | 10.21203/rs.3.rs-46044/v2 |
| Popis: | Background Many countries have developed heat-health watch and warning systems (HHWWS) or early-warning systems to mitigate the health consequences of extreme heat events. HHWWS usually focuses on the four hottest months of the year and imposes the same threshold over these months. However, according to climate projections, the warm season is expected to extend and/or shift. Some studies demonstrated that health impacts of heat waves are more severe when the human body is not acclimatized to the heat. In order to adapt those systems to potential heat waves occurring outside the hottest months of the season, this study proposes specific health-based monthly heat indicators and thresholds over an extended season from April to October in the northern hemisphere. Methods The proposed approach, an adoption and extension of the HHWWS methodology currently implemented in Quebec (Canada). The latter is developed and applied to the Greater Montreal area (current population 4.3 million) based on historical health and meteorological data over the years. This approach consists of determining excess mortality episodes and then choosing monthly indicators and thresholds that may involve excess mortality. Results We obtain thresholds for the maximum and minimum temperature couple (in °C) that range from (respectively, 23 and 12) in April, to (32 and 21) in July and back to (25 and 13) in October. The resulting HHWWS is flexible, with health-related thresholds taking into account the seasonality and the monthly variability of temperatures over an extended summer season. Conclusions This adaptive and more realistic system has the potential to prevent, by data-driven health alerts, heat-related mortality outside the typical July–August months of heat waves. The proposed methodology is general and can be applied to other regions and situations based on their characteristics. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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