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Description
Daily, unweighted values of various heat metrics for every county in the contiguous United States from 2000-2020. The dataset includes minimum, maximum, and mean ambient temperature, dew-point temperature, humidex, heat index, net effective temperature, wet-bulb globe temperature, and Universal Thermal Climate Index. It was created by Keith R. Spangler and published in a 2022 Scientific Data paper.
Use Cases
Modeling heat-related health outcomes based on wet-bulb globe temperature and Universal Thermal Climate Index metrics.
Analyzing long-term heat exposure trends from 2000 to 2020 based on daily county-level data.
Assessing regional climate vulnerability by comparing various heat metrics like heat index and humidex.
Studying population-weighted heat exposure, as the unweighted means are based only on pixels with non-zero populations.
Strengths
Covers a 21-year time range from 2000 to 2020.
Includes multiple heat metrics such as wet-bulb globe temperature and Universal Thermal Climate Index.
Provides data at a daily frequency for the contiguous United States.
Limitations
Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
Monroe County, Florida and Nantucket County, Massachusetts are missing due to unavailability of source data.
Provenance
Source
Keith R. Spangler, based on modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information (ERA5-Land).
Collection Method
Derived from ERA5-Land reanalysis data, with unweighted means based on pixels with non-zero populations.
Time Range
2000-2020
Geography
Contiguous United States, county-level.
Data is provided as an .Rds file for use in R; users must assign the data to a new data frame using the readRDS() function. The dataset is provided 'as is' with no warranty.