Outdoor Thermal Comfort during Anomalous Heat at the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto, Canada

Abstract

Mass sporting events in the summertime are influenced by underlying weather patterns, with high temperatures posing a risk for spectators and athletes alike. To better understand weather variations in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) during the Pan American Games in 2015 (PA15 Games), Environment and Climate Change Canada deployed a mesoscale monitoring network system of 53 weather stations. Spatial maps across the GTA demonstrate large variations by heat metric (e.g., maximum temperature, humidex, and wet bulb globe temperature), identifying Hamilton, Ontario as an area of elevated heat and humidity, and hence risk for heat-related illness. A case study of the Hamilton Soccer Center examined on-site thermal comfort during a heat event and PA15 Soccer Games, demonstrating that athletes and spectators were faced with thermal discomfort and a heightened risk of heat-related illness. Results are corroborated by First Aid and emergency response data during the events, as well as insight from personal experiences and Twitter feed. Integrating these results provides new information on potential benefits to society from utilizing mesonet systems during large-scale sporting events. Results further improve our understanding of intra-urban heat variability and heat-health burden. The benefits of utilizing more comprehensive modeling approaches for human heat stress that coincide with fine-scale weather information are discussed.

Impacts of climate change on organized sport: A scoping review

“…There are also several sport medicine studies that examine athletic performance under varying conditions (e.g., cold, hot, extreme wind) that do not attribute these circumstances to climate change nor introduce climate change as a possible exacerbating factor of future inclement conditions. Consequently, much research that is salient to the subject but not specific regarding links to climate change was excluded from the review (e.g., Donnelly et al, 2016;Gossling et al, 2008;Herdt et al, 2018;Watanabe et al, 2017). This finding and its implications point to the importance of interdisciplinary research teams, the potential for sport researchers to take advantage of recent advances in the field of extreme-event attribution (Bellprat et al, 2019;Swain et al, 2020), and increased communication and collaboration between disciplines to advance climate research in sport moving forward.…”

Integrated urban services: Experience from four cities on different continents

“…The observational network was designed to provide environmental conditions at the sport venues sites and to capture meteorological patterns specific to Toronto, such as lake-breeze front tracking (as they can lead to high-impact weather or modify local conditions rapidly, e.g., Mariani et al, 2018), heat stress conditions (monitored by the Wet-Bulb Globe temperature -WBGT-index obtained with black globe thermometers measuring the radiant temperature, e.g., Herdt et al, 2018) or atmospheric pollution (e.g., using vehicle traverse sampling, Wren et al, 2018). Substantial time (years in some cases) was needed to obtain land use licenses or leases required for siting fixed stations.…”

Social weather: A review of crowdsourcing‐assisted meteorological knowledge services through social cyberspace

“…For example, insight from personal experiences and the Twitter feed was extracted during the Pan American Games in 2015 by Herdt et al to aid weather stations in evaluating thermal discomfort and the heightened risk of heat‐related illnesses. These subjective opinions are ultimately more densely deployed in the target area than weather stations are and provide the most direct feelings of the end users that weather stations cannot provide (Herdt et al , ). In addition, the SNS platforms provide different data according to their role and functions.…”