Escalating environmental summer heat exposure—a future threat for the European workforce

Casanueva, Ana; Kotlarski, Sven; Fischer, Andreas M.; Flouris, Andreas D.; Kjellström, Tord; Lemke, Bruno; Nybo, Lars; Schwierz, Cornelia; Liniger, Mark A.

doi:10.1007/s10113-020-01625-6

Cited by 51 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 70 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The effect of solar radiation increases heat exposure considerably, which might lead to critical heat stress conditions in Southern and Central Europe by the end of the 21st century [10]. The projected changes in heat stress conditions [11,12,13] relate to increased mortality [14] and labor productivity losses [10,15,16,17,18]. Even under a 2 °C warmer world, the number of heat-related deaths in urban areas could multiply by a factor of 2 to 3 compared to current climate [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overview of Existing Heat-Health Warning Systems in Europe

Casanueva

Burgstall

Kotlarski

et al. 2019

IJERPH

Self Cite

150

126

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The frequency of extreme heat events, such as the summer of 2003 in Europe, and their corresponding consequences for human beings are expected to increase under a warmer climate. The joint collaboration of institutional agencies and multidisciplinary approaches is essential for a successful development of heat-health warning systems and action plans which can reduce the impacts of extreme heat on the population. The present work constitutes a state-of-the-art review of 16 European heat-health warning systems and heat-health action plans, based on the existing literature, web search (over the National Meteorological Services websites) and questionnaires. The aim of this study is to pave the way for future heat-health warning systems, such as the one currently under development in the framework of the Horizon 2020 HEAT-SHIELD project. Some aspects are highlighted among the variety of examined European warning systems. The meteorological variables that trigger the warnings should present a clear link with the impact under consideration and should be chosen depending on the purpose and target of the warnings. Setting long-term planning actions as well as pre-alert levels might prevent and reduce damages due to heat. Finally, education and communication are key elements of the success of a warning system.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overview of Existing Heat-Health Warning Systems in Europe

Casanueva

Burgstall

Kotlarski

et al. 2019

IJERPH

Self Cite

150

126

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For the European sector a growing number of studies exists that investigates the climate change impacts on various variables and for specific European regions (e.g. Pfeifer et al 2015; Bartók et al 2017;Frei et al 2018;Hosseinzadehtalaei et al 2018;Kjellström et al 2018;Potopová et al 2018;Cardoso et al 2019;Boé et al 2020;Casanueva et al 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is interactive air sea coupling relevant for simulating the future climate of Europe?

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The majority of regional climate change assessments for the Euro-CORDEX region is based on high resolution atmosphere models. These models use prescribed lower boundary conditions, such as sea surface temperatures (SST) from global ocean General Circulation Models (GCMs), that do not respond to changes simulated by the regional atmosphere model, thus lacking an important feedback to the atmosphere. However, research during the past decade indicated that the use of coupled atmosphere–ocean models can lead to significantly altered model solutions compared to standalone atmosphere models for the present day climate imposing some uncertainty on the widely used uncoupled future scenarios. We here present the first multi-model and multi scenario (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP8.5) ensemble of future climate change scenarios downscaled with a coupled atmosphere—ocean model in which sea surface temperature and sea ice fields are explicitly simulated by a coupled state-of-the-art high resolution ocean model and communicated to the atmosphere at 3-hourly time steps. Our ensemble generally confirms results of previous uncoupled ensembles over land areas implying that the coupling effect is restricted mainly to the coupled area and the adjacent coastal zone. By contrast, over the North Sea and Baltic Sea small scale processes point to important coupling effects that mediate the response to climate change and that can not be simulated by uncoupled models. Our results therefore impose general uncertainty on the usage of regional climate change data from uncoupled ensembles over marine areas such as for purposes of offshore wind or mussel farming, the planing of marine protected areas, and marine recreation along the coastal zone. It further sets in question the usage of uncoupled scenario data (such as Euro-CORDEX) to force high resolution ocean models. Comparing coupled and uncoupled hindcast simulations reveals that the coupling effect over land is most pronounced during the warm season when prescribed and modelled sea surface temperatures (SST) differ strongest. In addition, a generally weaker wind regime in summer damps the heat dispersion in the atmosphere so that air temperature anomalies can extent further over land compared to winter. Future projections are discussed under consideration of land-sea warming characteristics for selected climate indices as well as mean seasonal climate change. At the end of the century a clear land-sea pattern is seen in all scenarios with stronger warming over land than over open sea areas. On average land areas warm at a rate 1.5 times faster than areas over the open ocean. Over the coupled area, i.e. the North Sea and Baltic Sea tropical nights are impacted strongest and the Baltic Sea turns out to be a hot spot in future climate. This has been unrecognized in previous studies using high resolution atmosphere models with prescribed SSTs from global models which do not represent small scale ocean processes in the Baltic Sea adequately.

show abstract

“…HadGEM in particular projects an increase of summer mean WBGT of 5°C (European-average, end of 21 st century, RCP8.5) and HadGEM-driven RCM simulations of about 4-4.5°C. These results are at the upper limit of the uncertainty range when compared to a large ensemble of GCM-RCM simulations (Casanueva, et al, 2018b). Therefore relying only on this GCM could lead to misleading conclusions when combined with other factors in impact assessments.…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…Within this framework, the Horizon 2020 HEAT-SHIELD project (www.heat-shield.eu) aims to address the effects of climate change on European working population within an inter-sectoral framework . In 20 particular, one of the specific objectives of the project is to generate climate change projections of heat stress (Casanueva, et al, 2018b).…”

Section: Heat Stress Indexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate projections of a multi-variate heat stress index: the role of downscaling and bias correction

Casanueva¹,

Kotlarski²,

Herrera³

et al. 2019

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Along with the higher demand of bias-corrected data for climate impact studies, the number of available data sets has largely increased in the recent years. For instance, the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) constitutes a framework for consistently projecting the impacts of climate change across affected sectors and spatial scales. These data are very attractive for any impact application since they offer worldwide bias-corrected data based on Global Climate Models (GCMs). Complementary, the CORDEX initiative has incorporated experiments based on regionally-downscaled bias-corrected data by means of debiasing and quantile mapping (QM) methods. In light of this situation, it is challenging to distil the most accurate and useful information for climate services, but at the same time it creates a perfect framework for intercomparison and sensitivity analyses. In the present study, the trend-preserving ISIMIP method and empirical QM are applied to climate model simulations that were carried out at different spatial resolutions (CMIP5 GCM and EURO-CORDEX Regional Climate Models (RCMs), at approximately 150 km, 50 km and 12 km horizontal resolution, respectively) in order to assess the role of downscaling and bias correction in a multi-variate framework. The analysis is carried out for the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), a heat stress index that is commonly used in the context of working people and labour productivity. WBGT for shaded conditions depends on air temperature and dew point temperature, which in this work are individually bias-corrected prior to the index calculation. Our results show that the added value of RCMs with respect to the driving GCM is limited after bias correction. The two bias correction methods are able to adjust the central part of the WBGT distribution, but some added value of QM is found in WBGT percentiles and in the intervariable relationships. The evaluation in present climate of such multivariate indices should be performed with caution since biases in the individual variables might compensate, thus leading to better performance for the wrong reason. Climate change projections of WBGT reveal a larger increase of summer mean heat stress for the GCM than for the RCMs, related to the well-known reduced summer warming of the EURO-CORDEX RCMs. These differences are lowered after QM, since this bias correction method modifies the change signals and brings the results for GCM and RCMs closer to each other. We also highlight the need of large ensembles of simulations to assess the feasibility of the derived projections.

show abstract

Escalating environmental summer heat exposure—a future threat for the European workforce

Cited by 51 publications

References 70 publications

Overview of Existing Heat-Health Warning Systems in Europe

Overview of Existing Heat-Health Warning Systems in Europe

Is interactive air sea coupling relevant for simulating the future climate of Europe?

Climate projections of a multi-variate heat stress index: the role of downscaling and bias correction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About