Abstract
Heatwaves are characterized by an increase in temperature to extreme levels, which adversely distress the living organisms. India ranks second in terms of disaster mortality among the world countries, preponderantly by heatwave—influenced by regional climatology. In this study, the Excess Heat Factor (EHF) index is used to detect the heatwave using the ERA-Interim reanalysis dataset over various states of India during the summer period (April–June of 2017–2019). EHF categorizes heatwaves based on the severity, which is an intensity measure created by combining the measures of excess heat, long-term temperatures anomaly characteristics by each location’s unique climatology of heat by various thresholds. The heatwave events are analysed by combining the means of excess heat and heat stress, which has a strong aspect of EHF measurements. Concerning the intensity of future heatwaves, EHF index helps to analyse the frequency and intensity of heatwave episodes and alert those community most exposed to heat related illness. One of the indices is derived from a climatological background to analyse the severity of heatwave over the Indian states. The analysis over India using the EHF index reflected a substantial rate of increase in the intensity and the frequency of heatwaves in the successive years with an average EHF intensity (mean EHF for the analysis period) of ~ 41 °C2, ~ 38 °C2 and ~ 39 °C2, especially over the north–western states, eastern coastal states and central and southern states, respectively. The results of this study serve as a drive in the risk and vulnerability planning and assessment.
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Data availability
Publicly available datasets were analysed in this study. These datasets can be found in ERA-Interim—https://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-full-daily/levtype=sfc/ and IMD gridded—https://imdpune.gov.in/Clim_Pred_LRF_New/Grided_Data_Download.html.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and India Meteorological Department for making the availability of the ERA-Interim and IMD gridded data. The authors would like to thank the National Institute of Technology Rourkela for the lab facility and to the fellow lab mates for their constant support. Authors are thankful to the reviewers (one anonymous and Dr. Nikoletta Pakalidou) for their constructive suggestions to improve the manuscript quality.
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Communicated by Theodore Karacostas, Prof. (CO-EDITOR-IN-CHIEF).
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Hari, M., Tyagi, B. Investigating Indian summer heatwaves for 2017–2019 using reanalysis datasets. Acta Geophys. 69, 1447–1464 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11600-021-00603-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11600-021-00603-8