West Africa Hourly Heat Stress Data from 1974 to 2023

Hourly Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) data for West Africa covers a 50-year period from 1974 to 2023. The dataset was created by Ivana Cvijanovic and colleagues for research on the emergence of heat stress hotspots. It is hosted on the Harvard Dataverse platform.

Use Cases

• Model long-term trends in heat stress based on the 50-year time series.
• Identify geographic hotspots of extreme heat conditions across West Africa.
• Assess human health risks from heat exposure using hourly WBGT values.
• Validate climate model projections against historical hourly observations.

Strengths

• Covers a long temporal span of 50 years (1974-2023).
• Provides data at an hourly resolution for detailed analysis.
• Focuses on the specific and impactful metric of Wet Bulb Globe Temperature.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse

Time Range

1974 to 2023

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-06 19:49:57; freshness should be verified.

Geography

West Africa