Tell me the temperature and I will tell you your chances of dying
Climate change and its resulting extreme temperatures are causing millions of premature deaths worldwide each year. This stresses the need for early warning systems that predict how forecast temperatures could impact people’s health. To meet this need, researchers supported by the EU-funded EARLY-ADAPT, HHS-EWS and FORECAST-AIR projects have developed an open-access platform called forecaster.health. The first pan-European platform of its kind, forecaster.health uses sex- and age-specific epidemiological models to predict the mortality risks of ambient temperatures for different population groups.
The risk across Europe
Users enter the date and population subgroup (based on gender or age range) for which they want a temperature-related mortality prediction, within a window of up to 2 weeks. The system then displays a map with warnings for 580 regions in 31 European countries. The colour coded warnings refer to five levels of cold- and heat-related mortality risk: none, low, moderate, high and extreme. “Until now, temperature warnings have been solely based on the physical information of weather forecasts, and therefore, they ignore the differences in vulnerability to heat and cold among population groups,” states associate research professor Joan Ballester Claramunt of EARLY-ADAPT, HHS-EWS and FORECAST-AIR project coordinator Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), Spain, in a recent news item. “Our system changes this paradigm by shifting the focus from meteorology to epidemiology and the social determinants of vulnerability to the environmental factors. Forecaster.health does not only forecast the temperatures themselves, but also the actual risks that these temperatures have on the population as a whole, and especially, on specific population subgroups based on sex and age.” To fit separate epidemiological models for population groups, the research team used EARLY-ADAPT’s mortality database, which currently has data on 580 regions classified by sex, age and cause of death. The tool obtains temperature records and forecasts on a daily basis. It also uses epidemiological models to calculate the risk of temperature-related mortality by sex and age group for any day within the following 2 weeks. ISGlobal researcher Marcos Quijal-Zamorano explains further: “We know that vulnerability to heat is influenced by a number of factors, including sex and age. We know, for example, that women are more susceptible to heat than men, and that the risk of death for both heat and cold increases with age. For that reason, our tool separately fits epidemiological models for each sex and age group, which allows us to issue independent warnings accounting for the real impacts on the population.” Next on the agenda for the platform, developed with support from EARLY-ADAPT (Signs of Early Adaptation to Climate Change), HHS-EWS (Operational Heat-Health-Social Early Warning System) and FORECAST-AIR (Open-Access Forecasting System of the Health Effects of Air Pollution), is the inclusion of new countries and smaller regions. Future plans also include the development of new epidemiological models to incorporate health warnings for several air pollutants and the introduction of warnings for specific causes of death and other health outcomes. For more information, please see: EARLY-ADAPT project website HHS-EWS project FORECAST-AIR project Forecaster.health website
Keywords
EARLY-ADAPT, HHS-EWS, FORECAST-AIR, early warning, temperature, heat, forecast, mortality, epidemiological