Global WBGT estimates based on ISIMIP3b

Project: Climate Change and Health in sub-Saharan Africa - This Research Unit (RU) addresses the growing public health concern of accelerated disease burden as a consequence of climate change. So far, there have been very limited concerted efforts by public health scientists, climate change researchers, and social scientists to quantify the climate change impacts on human health, and to design appropriate adaptation strategies. This is particularly true for vulnerable populations in sub-Saharan Africa, despite the facts that rural populations in Africa are strongly affected by climate change and exhibit the lowest adaptive capacity. Indeed, this sub-continent faces an unfinished agenda of combating undernutrition and infectious diseases with all the negative societal and economic consequences. At the same time, non-communicable conditions have been rapidly emerging in sub-Saharan Africa over the past decades, and their management now competes with the limited resources of the local health systems. To date, the additional impacts of climate change on three of these major health problems in the region, namely childhood undernutrition, malaria and cardio-vascular dysfunction have been insufficiently defined.
Therefore, this RU aims at i) establishing the causal pathways from weather changes through hydrological, agricultural and economic factors to undernutrition, malaria and heat stress among defined rural populations in Burkina Faso and Kenya, ii) projecting future developments along these pathways, iii) quantifying the effectiveness, the socio-economic costs, and the changes in projections of promising climate-specific adaptation strategies, iv) upscaling the historic and projected scenarios from the local to the national level, and finally, v) identifying broader societal impacts related to long-term health consequences of climate change.

This project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Summary: The CCH project (Climate Change and Health in sub-Saharan Africa, https://cch-africa.de) focuses on the rising health impacts of climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where vulnerable populations are most at risk. Despite the urgency, there has been little collaboration across disciplines to assess these effects or develop effective adaptation strategies. Key health challenges - childhood undernutrition, malaria, and cardiovascular dysfunction—remain under-researched in the context of climate change. As part of this experiment, we generated a global dataset of Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) projections to serve as a bioclimatic indicator for quantifying the potential health impacts of climate change.

An ensemble of daily average WBGT estimates based on the primary and secondary ISIMIP3b (https://www.isimip.org) model ensemble (10 models) is provided. The ensemble includes the historical (1850–2014), SSP1-2.6 (2015–2100), SSP3-7.0 (2015–2100), and SSP5-8.5 (2015–2100) experiments.

WBGT was estimated on an hourly basis using the PyWBGT Python package (Kong and Huber, 2022, doi:10.1029/2021EF002334), based on the Liljegren method (Liljegren et al., 2008, doi:10.1080/15459620802310770). This method estimates WBGT from 2 m air temperature (tas), near-surface relative humidity (hurs), surface pressure (ps), 10 m wind speed (sfcWind), and surface downward solar radiation (rsds). Hourly values were derived from daily values using an average diurnal cycle calculated separately for each Julian day. WBGT was estimated for each hour and then averaged to obtain daily values. The dataset covers the entire globe, excluding Antarctica.

The following 10 models from the ISIMIP3b projects are used:
CanESM5 - r1i1p1f1
CNRM-CM6-1 - r1i1p1f2
CNRM-ESM2-1 - r1i1p1f2
EC-Earth3 - r1i1p1f1
GFDL-ESM4 - r1i1p1f1
IPSL-CM6A-LR - r1i1p1f1
MIROC6 - r1i1p1f1
MPI-ESM1-2-HR - r1i1p1f1
MRI-ESM2-0 - r1i1p1f1
UKESM1-0-LL - r1i1p1f2