UK Urban Heatwave Exposure Linked to Land Cover Change, 2000-2014

2000 to 2014 high-resolution (0.05°) physical-process-based simulations from the Community Terrestrial Systems Model (CTSM) characterize historical urban heatwaves and population exposure across the UK. The dataset includes four aggregated indicators—frequency, duration, season length, and intensity—and was validated against the HadUK-Grid observational dataset. It was created by Yuan Sun and published on figshare under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Analyzing trends in urban heatwave frequency, duration, and intensity based on the four aggregated indicators.
• Assessing population exposure to heatwaves in person-days based on the model outputs.
• Evaluating the contribution of urban land cover change to heatwave exposure based on the reported additional person-days.
• Validating or comparing high-resolution climate model simulations against the HadUK-Grid observational dataset.

Strengths

• Model reliability validated with an RMSE of 0.5°C for the 95th percentile of simulated UK-average summertime daily maximum air temperatures.
• Dataset size of 51.9 GB suggests high spatial and temporal resolution.
• Covers a 15-year time range (2000-2014) with transient urban land cover representation.
• Provides specific exposure metrics, such as 367.2 million person-days in 2003 and 412.1 million in 2013.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to its UK-only focus.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Yuan Sun.

Collection Method

High-resolution simulations using the Community Terrestrial Systems Model (CTSM) with transient urban land cover.

Time Range

2000 to 2014.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04 15 11:11:11; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom.