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Classification of daily weather types in Colombia: a tool to evaluate human health risks due to temperature variability

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Abstract

The building of knowledge about current risks from changes in air temperature has been established as critical for informing the starting point for human health risk assessments in a climate-changing world. The study presented in this paper provides the application of the maximum/minimum temperature complex method in Colombia to identify the simultaneous behavior of daily extremes of air temperature and provide a tool to assess human health risks due to temperature variability. An established classification of mean temperatures exists for the country, and maximum and minimum temperatures have been studied but never as simultaneous variables. The max/min temperature complex analysis aims to describe the air temperature regime of a particular place by studying the frequency of simultaneous occurrence of extreme daily temperatures. The study consisted of the construction of a contingency table that combines the behavior of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures using a subdivision of 5 °C intervals. A 5-year (2010–2015)-long dataset of 171 weather stations from the entire territory was prepared by identifying, filtering, and completing the missing data. Frequencies of occurrence of each interval were arranged in descending order to select the intervals of frequencies above 10%. Then, they were classified into categories, types, and subtypes. Six categories, seven types, and fifty-one subtypes were identified and mapped to ascertain their geographical distribution. In contrast with other climate regime classifications, our study found a regionalization of daily extremes of temperature that can be analyzed in different scales of time and space to aid health risk analysis.

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Notes

  1. The complex term in this context refers to the school of complex climatology defined by E.E Fedorov (Lydolph 1959) in the Soviet Union and called “complex” because it works with the representation of index and parameters form by two or more independent variables which interactions are categorized by symbols.

  2. The use of 5 °C intervals corresponds with the general statistical structure of the air temperature in the humid tropics. Due to the small variation of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures, the data dispersion on a dataset of temperatures from weather station in different locations and altitudes through time is small. Since the majority of temperature data concentrates around the mean value, the entire range of the data series can be divided into small intervals that result in a detailed categorizations of the data analyzed. In the case of the dataset evaluated for this study, the smallest minimum temperature found was − 10 °C and the greatest 30 °C. For the maximum daily temperatures, the smallest number found is 5 °C and the greatest 45 °C. Since the intervals of the extremes of the histogram are the less frequent, the cuts made for the contingency table correspond to the general statistical structure of the air temperature of Colombia.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Administrative Department of Science, Technology and Innovation of Colombia (COLCIENCIAS) for providing the opportunity for this research with its doctoral graduates’ overseas program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Health, School of Public Health, University of São Paulo, Av. Doutor Arnaldo 715, São Paulo, SP, 01246-904, Brazil

    D. J. Roncancio & A.C. Nardocci

  2. Center of Environmental Research and Services of Villa Clara, Santa Clara, Villa Clara, Cuba

    L. Lecha

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  1. D. J. Roncancio
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  2. L. Lecha
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  3. A.C. Nardocci
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Correspondence to D. J. Roncancio.

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Roncancio, D.J., Lecha, L. & Nardocci, A. Classification of daily weather types in Colombia: a tool to evaluate human health risks due to temperature variability. Int J Biometeorol 64, 1795–1806 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-020-01963-4

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