Recent Increases in Exposure to Extreme Humid-Heat Events Disproportionately Affect Populated Regions ...
Extreme heat research has largely focused on dry-heat, while humid-heat that poses a substantial threat to human-health remains relatively understudied. Using hourly high-resolution ERA5 reanalysis and HadISD station data, we provide the first spatially comprehensive, global-scale characterization o...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
Columbia University
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.7916/d8-cpch-8t23 https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-cpch-8t23 |
| Summary: | Extreme heat research has largely focused on dry-heat, while humid-heat that poses a substantial threat to human-health remains relatively understudied. Using hourly high-resolution ERA5 reanalysis and HadISD station data, we provide the first spatially comprehensive, global-scale characterization of the magnitude, seasonal timing, and frequency of dry- and wet-bulb temperature extremes and their trends. While the peak dry- and humid-heat extreme occurrences often coincide, their timing differs in climatologically wet regions. Since 1979, dry- and humid-heat extremes have become more frequent over most land regions, with the greatest increases in the tropics and Arctic. Humid-heat extremes have increased disproportionately over populated regions (∼5.0 days per-person per-decade) relative to global land-areas (∼3.6 days per-unit-land-area per-decade) and population exposure to humidheat has increased at a faster rate than to dry-heat. Our study highlights the need for a multivariate approach to understand and ... |
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