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A general and flexible methodology to define thresholds for heat health watch and warning systems, applied to the province of Québec (Canada)

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Abstract

Several watch and warning systems have been established in the world in recent years to prevent the effects of heat waves. However, many of these approaches can be applied only in regions with perfect conditions (e.g., enough data, stationary series or homogeneous regions). Furthermore, a number of these approaches do not account for possible trend in mortality and/or temperature series, whereas others are generally not adapted to regions with low population densities or low daily mortality levels. In addition, prediction based on multiple days preceding the event can be less accurate if it attributes the same importance to each of these days, since the forecasting accuracy actually decreases with the period. The aim of the present study was to identify appropriate indicators as well as flexible and general thresholds that can be applied to a variety of regions and conditions. From a practical point of view, the province of Québec constitutes a typical case where a number of the above-mentioned constraints are present. On the other hand, until recently, the province’s watch and warning system was based on a study conducted in 2005, covering only the city of Montreal and applied to the whole province. The proposed approach is applied to each one of the other health regions of the province often experiencing low daily counts of mortality and presenting trends. The first constraint led to grouping meteorologically homogeneous regions across the province in which the number of deaths is sufficient to carry out the appropriate data analyses. In each region, mortality trends are taken into account. In addition, the proposed indicators are defined by a 3-day weighted mean of maximal and minimal temperatures. The sensitivity of the results to the inclusion of traumatic deaths is also checked. The application shows that the proposed method improved the results in terms of sensitivity, specificity and number of yearly false alarms, compared to those of the existing and other classical approaches. An additional criterion based on the Humidex is applied in a second step and a local validation is applied to historical observations at reference forecasting stations. An integrated heat health watch and warning system with thresholds that are adapted to the regional climate has thus been established for each sub-region of the province of Quebec and became operational in June 2010.

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Acknowledgments

This project was funded by the Fonds vert in the context of Action 21 of the 2006–2012 Quebec Action Plan on Climate Change. The authors thank the Ministry of Health and Social Services of Quebec and the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks of Quebec of their funding and support for this project. The authors wish also to thank Marc Beauchemin and Stéphane Gagnon from Environment Canada, as well as Eric Litvak (U. Sherbrooke) for their valuable advice, and Christian Charron for securing access to the data. The authors thank the reviewers, the Associate Editor and the Editor-in-Chief for their comments, which significantly improved the quality and clarity of the paper. We acknowledge the partial contribution of the IRIACC-FACE program of IDRC (Canada).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique/INRS-ETE, 490 de la Couronne, Québec, QC, Canada, G1K 9A9

    Fateh Chebana, Jean-Xavier Giroux & Taha B. M. J. Ouarda

  2. Institut National de Santé Publique du Québec/INSPQ, 945 rue Wolfe, Québec, QC, Canada, G1V 5B3

    Barbara Martel & Pierre Gosselin

  3. Masdar Institute of Science and technology, PO Box 54224, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Taha B. M. J. Ouarda

Authors
  1. Fateh Chebana
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  2. Barbara Martel
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  3. Pierre Gosselin
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  4. Jean-Xavier Giroux
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  5. Taha B. M. J. Ouarda
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Correspondence to Fateh Chebana.

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Chebana, F., Martel, B., Gosselin, P. et al. A general and flexible methodology to define thresholds for heat health watch and warning systems, applied to the province of Québec (Canada). Int J Biometeorol 57, 631–644 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-012-0590-2

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