Heat is one of the most frequently examined environmental influences on population health, and a wide variety of data sources exist to measure exposure. This pre-PAA workshop, sponsored by the Center on Aging, Health, and Environment (CACHE), provides an overview of heat measures and examples of two, including hands-on experience with code available via the CACHE website. Participants will generate temperature exposure measures from publicly available data, as well as wet bulb temperatures. The Universal Thermal Climate Index data will also be demonstrated and linked to population data. Learn more and register here. This workshop will take place in St. Louis, Missouri on May 6, 1-5:30 PM CT . Please note you must be registered for PAA in order to attend.

The workshop’s first exercise uses data from two different sources: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather-stations and ERA5-Land Reanalysis from the European Union’s Copernicus Project. Both are publicly available. The workshop will review information on acquiring and cleaning daily temperature data for New York City, as an example. Key is that air temperature as well as wet bulb temperature exposure variables are generated, and at varying temporal resolution. On the CACHE website, the code is embedded in an R Markdown pdf file.

The second exercise demonstrates how to construct severe heat measures using the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI, Copernicus ERA5-HEAT). It starts by showing data manipulation from raster (grid data) to a tabular dataset that obtains UTCI values for each municipality in Mexico as an example. Then, the data are mapped and analyzed as linked to population data. Finally, the number of days of severe heat (32°C UTCI and above) are generated. This code, also available on the CACHE website, is part of the demonstration CACHE project “Heat, Disability in older adults and Care” from El Colegio de Mexico.

Lead Instructors:

Dr. Frank Heiland, CUNY Institute for Demographic Research

Dr. Alex Mikulas, CACHE

Dr. Landy Sanchez, El Colegio de Mexico

Organizers: 

Lori Hunter, University of Colorado Boulder, and Deborah Balk, CUNY Institute for Demographic Research