WELL — Global gridded reconstruction of heat- and cold-induced workplace labour loss, 1950–2025

This dataset provides a 75-year global reconstruction of thermal labour loss derived from ERA5-Land hourly reanalysis (1950–2025). Annual labour loss is quantified using the WELL (Workplace Environmental Labour Loss) response function (Ioannou et al., 2025, JOEM 67(6):393–399), which relates outdoor Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) to work time loss (WTL) through a U-shaped cubic polynomial fitted from real-world second-by-second worker performance data across six countries. Outdoor WBGT is computed hourly at ~10 km global resolution following ISO 7243:2017: natural wet-bulb temperature (Twb) is derived via Newton-Raphson solution of the psychrometric equation using ERA5-Land surface pressure; globe temperature (Tg) follows the Liljegren et al. (2008) radiative approach; WBGT = 0.7·Twb + 0.2·Tg + 0.1·Tdb. Hourly fractional WTL values are summed to annual totals expressed in hours-equivalent per year (h-eq·yr⁻¹), where one h-eq represents one complete hour of productive work capacity lost to thermal stress. Results are normalised per 10,000 working-age inhabitants (WorldPop 15–65 yr, 2015 baseline). Three coefficient variants are provided for each year — upper bound, mean (primary result), and lower bound — enabling uncertainty quantification. Heat-induced and cold-induced components are separated at the WBGT optimum (x_min: 15.6 °C for the mean curve). Contents: 76 annual GeoTIFFs (1950–2025), 9 bands each: WELL 76 annual mean 2 m temperature GeoTIFFs (ERA5-Land): t2m Working-age population raster (WorldPop 2015): worldpop_1565_2015.tif IPCC AR6 climate zone classification: IPCC_Climate_Zones_ts_3.25.tif Full analysis code in R and Google Earth Engine JavaScript: code All rasters: EPSG:4326, ~0.09° resolution (~10 km at the equator), Float32.