Heat waves give rise to order of magnitude higher mortality rates than other weather-related natural disasters. Unfortunately both the severity and amplitude of heat waves are predicted to increase worldwide as a consequence of climate change. Hence, meteorological services have a growing need to identify such periods in order to set alerts, whilst researchers and industry need representative future heat waves to study risk. This paper introduces a new location-specific mortality risk focused definition of heat waves and a new mathematical framework for the creation of time series that represents them. It focuses on identifying periods when temperatures are high during the day and night, as this coincidence is strongly linked to mortality. The approach is tested using observed data from Brazil and the UK. Comparisons with previous methods demonstrate that this new approach represents a major advance that can be adopted worldwide by governments, researchers and industry.

与其他与天气有关的自然灾害相比，热浪导致的死亡率更高。不幸的是，由于气候变化，预计全球范围内热浪的强度和幅度都会增加。因此，气象服务部门越来越需要确定这样的时期以发出警报，而研究人员和工业界则需要有代表性的未来热浪来研究风险。本文介绍了一种新的针对特定地点的以死亡风险为中心的热浪定义，以及用于创建代表它们的时间序列的新数学框架。它着重于确定白天和夜晚温度较高的时期，因为这种巧合与死亡率密切相关。使用从巴西和英国观察到的数据对这种方法进行了测试。