Developing a Spatiotemporal Repository of Extreme Heat and Cold Exposure in the United States for Precision Public Health Research

Accurate attribution of the areas and populations impacted by climate-related events often relies on linear distance-based methods, where the study unit is assigned temperature data to the closest weather station. We developed a novel method and data pipeline that provides a grid-based measure of exposure to extreme heat and cold events called Grid EXposure (<i>GridEX)</i>, enabling linkage to individual-level human health data at different spatial scales. GridEX automates the gathering of station-based climatological data and provides estimates of apparent temperature, offering a more comprehensive representation of human thermal comfort and perceived temperature. It dynamically identifies the boundaries of Extreme Heat and Cold Events (EHE/ECE) over time, with a very high spatial resolution of 500 × 500m. GridEX is designed for integration with external health and socioeconomic data sets, irrespective of their geographic boundaries. We validated our spatial model using station temperature observations from the NOAA Integrated Surface Database (ISD) and reanalysis surface climate data provided by GridMET. The improvements we made in our approach help reduce the misclassification of different population subgroups that might otherwise be missed or incorrectly identified using the conventional methods. This exposure data resource is primed for precision health applications, such as enabling the computation of associations between extreme events and health outcomes important for exposomics research in the future.