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Several studies evidenced the importance of the knowledge of the bioclimatic comfort for improving people's quality of life. temperature and relative humidity are the main variables related to climatic comfort/discomfort, influencing the environmental stress in the human body. In this study, a stochastic approach is proposed for characterizing the bioclimatic conditions through the Humidex values in six sites of calabria (southern italy), a region often hit by heat waves in summer months. the stochastic approach is essential, because the available time series of temperature and relative humidity are not long enough and present several missing values. the model allowed the characterization of sequences of extreme values of the Humidex. Results showed different behaviours between inner and coastal stations. For example, a sequence of 20 consecutive days with maximum daily Humidex values greater than 35 has a return period ranging from 10 to 20 years for the inner stations, while it exceeds 100 years for the coastal ones. The maximum yearly Humidex values for the inner stations have a larger range (40-50) than the coastal ones (38-45), reaching higher occurrence probabilities of serious danger conditions. Besides, the different influence of temperature and relative humidity on the Humidex behaviour has been evidenced. Bioclimatic comfort is a cognitive process that mixes many stimuli influenced by physical, physiological, and psychological factors 1. Previous researches evidenced the fundamental importance of the knowledge of the bioclimatic comfort for improving people's quality of life. In fact, in the last years temperatures over 36 °C, especially in situations of heat waves, severely affected people's health, mainly if children, elderly and chronically ill 2,3. An increase of severe heat waves in the current century has been forecasted in areas already affected by heat stress, such as the southern part of the European continent 4-6 and the Mediterranean basin, which is expected to face particularly high impacts from global warming and climate change and to be most vulnerable to their deleterious effects 7. The effects of heat can be various: increase of mortality 8 , working/exercise capacity 9,10 and cognitive performance 11,12. For the analysis of bioclimatic comfort, in studies conducted at different spatial scales in various parts of the world (e.g. in America 13-16 , in Europe 17-19 , in Asia 20-22 and in Oceania 23) several parameters such as temperature, relative humidity of the air, wind and radiation have been analysed. In particular, given their influence on the environmental stress in the human body, temperature and the relative humidity of the air are the key basic parameters related to climatic comfort/discomfort 1. In fact, as stated by Masterton and Richardson 24 , with different humidity conditions the same temperature can provide very different feelings to people. For this reason, in order to detect the effect of heat on human health, an index that combines the effects of temperature and humidit...

Knowledge of bioclimatic comfort is paramount for improving people’s quality of life. To this purpose, several studies related to climatic comfort/discomfort have been recently published. These studies mainly focus on the analysis of temperature and relative humidity, i.e., the main variables influencing the environmental stress in the human body. In this context, the present work aims to analyze the number of visits to the hospital emergency department made by the inhabitants of the Crati River valley (Calabria region, southern Italy) during the heat waves that accompanied the African anticyclone in the summer of 2017. The analysis of the bioclimatic comfort was performed using the humidity index. Results showed that greater the index, the higher the number of accesses to the emergency department, in particular by the most vulnerable population groups, such as children and the elderly.

Abstract. Since June 2008, 1-h temperature forecasts for the Calabria region (Southern Italy) are issued at 2.5 km horizontal resolution at CRATI/ISAC-CNR. Forecasts are available online at http://meteo.crati.it/ previsioni.html (every 6-h). This paper shows the forecast performance out to three days for one climatological year (from 1 December 2008 to 30 November 2009, 365 run) for minimum, mean and maximum temperature. The forecast is evaluated against gridded analyses at the same horizontal resolution.Gridded analysis is based on Optimal Interpolation (OI) and uses a de-trending technique for computing the background field. Observations from 87 thermometers are used in the analysis system.In this paper cumulative statistics are shown to quantify forecast errors out to three days.