EGU21-8018, updated on 04 Mar 2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-8018
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Heatwave risk for two regions of the UK: Aberdeenshire and South East England 

Jeetendra Sahani1, Sisay Debele1, and Prashant Kumar1,2
Jeetendra Sahani et al.
  • 1University of Surrey, GCARE, CEE, FEPS, Guildford, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales (j.sahani@surrey.ac.uk)
  • 2Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Global warming due to anthropogenic emission of green-house gases has induced climate change which is disturbing and will continue to impact the ecology and energy balance of our earth environment. The duration, frequency and intensity of extreme hot days in summers called heatwaves have increased with the beginning of the 21st century worldwide and have been projected to increase. Associated human health loss or damage can be managed or mitigated by planning proper management strategies, such as nature-based green and/or blue solutions in advance, along with proper evaluation of the risk of heat. Since heat stress is more pronounced in urban and built areas, most studies for heatwave risk assessment have been limited to big cities. The risk variation in semi-urban, sub-urban and rural areas has not been much investigated. The heat risk develops with time because of changing climate and socio-demographics, and risk assessment is needed to be done utilising recent data on climate and population characteristics. In this study, the heatwave or extreme hot (99 percentile) temperature risk has been estimated by using statistical approach on summer daily temperature and mortality data from Aberdeenshire and South East (SE) England, UK for the duration 1981-2018. A distributed-lag nonlinear model from Poisson regression family was applied to model the relationship between daily temperature and mortality. We calculated relative risk (RR) and mortality attributable fraction (AF) due to high temperature by comparing the extreme heat with the minimum mortality temperature. AF was calculated by dividing the number of excess deaths due to heat from all the days of the time-series by the total number of deaths. The overall risk in SE England was noted 56 % higher (RR 1.067) than Aberdeenshire (RR 1.043), with 36% more excess death in SE England (AF 0.15% and 0.11% respectively) due to different levels of people’s adaptation and resilience to different climate conditions.  The outcome of this study can help in site focused mitigation strategies to certain areas at most risk and develop a scientific framework for early warning, planning and managing the health impacts of heatwave in more rustic regions.

 

Acknowledgements: This work is supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme; funded by and carried out within the framework of OPERANDUM project (Grant no. 776848).

How to cite: Sahani, J., Debele, S., and Kumar, P.: Heatwave risk for two regions of the UK: Aberdeenshire and South East England , EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-8018, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-8018, 2021.

Displays

Display file