Assessing and Promoting Awareness of Heat Stress through Wet Bulb Globe Temperature

This project has two goals. The first is to develop an estimated national WBGT climatology. The second is to determine if there is a relationship between WBGT and hospitalizations and emergency department visits in Louisiana. The first goalwill be accomplished by calculating estimated WBGT, utilizing gridded data sets, such as ERA5-Land (Muñoz Sabater 2019), for the U.S. between 1990 and 2020. Additional analyses will include descriptive statistics, trend analyses, and data visualizations. The second goal will utilize the estimated WBGT alongside parish-level data from the Louisiana Department of Health. Statistical analyses of the relationship between WBGT and health data will include correlation, regression, and spatial analysis techniques, when applicable.