Ambient temperatures are associated with over 5 million premature deaths worldwide every year, more than 300,000 of which in Western Europe alone. In a context of rapidly warming temperatures that successively broke previous records during the last two decades, it is essential to use epidemiological models to develop novel, impact-based early warning systems predicting the health effects of forecast temperatures. This is precisely what the Adaptation group at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, has done: Forecaster.
health is the first pan-European, open-access platform using sex- and age-specific epidemiological models to predict the actual mortality risks of ambient temperatures for different segments of the population. The tool allows users to enter the date for which they want to obtain the health predictions within a window of up to two weeks, as well as the population subgroup for which they want to obtain the prediction of temperature related mortality. Once these variables have been selected, the system displays a map showing warnings for 580 regions in 31 European countries with colour codes corresponding to four levels of heat and cold related mortality risk: low, moderate, high and extreme.
"Until now, temperature warnings have been solely based on the physical information of weather forecasts, and therefore, they ignore the differences in vulnerability to heat and cold among population groups. Our s.
