Meteorological human discomfort indices, also referred to as thermal discomfort indices or bioclimatic indices are important metrics to gauge potential risks to human health under varying environmental thermal exposures.

Spanning 49 years over the period 1970-2018, our new dataset fills gaps in existing climate indices by being the only high-resolution historical global-gridded daily time-series of multiple human discomfort indices, thus offering applications in wide-ranging climate zones and thermal-comfort environments.

The indices are derived using meteorological variables from the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), a new generation high-resolution global reanalysis data product developed jointly by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. GLDAS incorporates satellite and ground-based observations, producing optimal fields of land surface states and fluxes in near-real-time, thus facilitating regular updates of the dataset presented in our study.

This new dataset referred to as “HDI_0p25_1970_2018” includes the following daily indices at 0.25° x 0.25° global gridded resolution: 

1. Apparent Temperature indoors (AT ind); 
2. two variants of Apparent Temperature outdoors in shade (AT ot ); 
3. Heat Index (HI); 
4. Humidex (HDEX); 
5. Wet Bulb Temperature (WBT); 
6. two variants of Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT); 
7. Thom Discomfort Index (DI) and 
8. Windchill Temperature (WCT). 

for a total of 44 billion data points.

• Data: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.904282
• Paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/11/8/835