Severe Heat Days using the Universal Thermal Comfort Index

Authors/Creators/ Team Members: Marcial Yangali (marcialy@colmex.mx)

Reviewers: Landy Sánchez and Emerson Baptista

Specific purpose of code: It demonstrates how to construct severe heat measures using the UTCI data (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. Then, it presents how to map and analyze such data. Finally, it shows how to count the number of days of severe heat (32°C UTCI and above). This script is part of the demonstration CACHE project “Heat, Disability in older adults and Care” from El Colegio de Mexico.

General Application: This develops familiarity with heat data and fundamental skills to construct an environmental dataset that can be easily integrate with demographic information.

How does or could this code allow researchers to assess research questions related  to aging or life course?: This code help to analyze exposure to severe heat days by age structure at a subnational level. Particularly, to understand how aging realtes to higher exposure to extreme weather. Historical UTCI measures could be employ to assess cumulative heat impacts across the life course.

Data sets used: 

• Two publicy available datasets are used:

  • Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI). Copernicous ERA5-HEAT
  • 2020 Mexican Municipalities and States boundaries. INEGI (Census Bureau office)

Coding Language:  R 

Tools and Packages used: R packages for data manipulation (mainly dplyr but also janitor, stringr, tidyr and forcats), visualization (ggplot2, patchwork), and geospatial operations (sf).

Output(s): Analysis results, maps and graphs

Spatial extent:Mexico (33.0°N (North), -118.5°E (East), 14.0°N (South), and -86.0°E (West)

Temporal extent: May 2019

Key words: heat, severe weather, thermal index, Mexico