Seasonal forecasting and health impact models: challenges and opportunities

Ballester, Joan; Lowe, Rachel; Diggle, Peter J.; Rodó, Xavier

doi:10.1111/nyas.13129

Cited by 17 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 98 publications

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“…When verified as being able to reproduce past outbreaks, such models can then be used with seasonal climate forecasts (for a detailed review, see Ref. ) or climate change projections to develop scenarios describing future risk.…”

Section: Recent Methodological Progress and Research Relevance To Decmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of recent and future climate change on vector‐borne diseases

Caminade

McIntyre

Jones

2018

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

515

282

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Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human health in the 21st century. Climate directly impacts health through climatic extremes, air quality, sea-level rise, and multifaceted influences on food production systems and water resources. Climate also affects infectious diseases, which have played a significant role in human history, impacting the rise and fall of civilizations and facilitating the conquest of new territories. Our review highlights significant regional changes in vector and pathogen distribution reported in temperate, peri-Arctic, Arctic, and tropical highland regions during recent decades, changes that have been anticipated by scientists worldwide. Further future changes are likely if we fail to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Many key factors affect the spread and severity of human diseases, including mobility of people, animals, and goods; control measures in place; availability of effective drugs; quality of public health services; human behavior; and political stability and conflicts. With drug and insecticide resistance on the rise, significant funding and research efforts must to be maintained to continue the battle against existing and emerging diseases, particularly those that are vector borne.

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Section: Recent Methodological Progress and Research Relevance To Decmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of recent and future climate change on vector‐borne diseases

Caminade

McIntyre

Jones

2018

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

515

282

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Increasingly, seasonal health forecasts are couched in probabilistic terms that have been found to pose communication and uptake problems, making it imperative for forecast developers to think carefully how forecasts are provided to end users [124]. In the context of climate services based on climate forecasts, Ballester et al [125] provide a sobering review of some of the challenges related to the construction of seasonal health forecasts. These include the capital and human resources and the associated governance arrangements required for development and implementation; the need for forecasting tools to master the complexity of the interactions between climate, disease transmission, socioeconomic disparities, and vulnerability; the imperative for integrated climate and health data sets; and acknowledgement that early warning systems and the climate forecasts on which they are based may only be effective when certain windows of opportunity present themselves, such as during ENSO events when there is a clear climate signature in a range of health responses.…”

Section: Enso and Health Forecastingmentioning

confidence: 99%

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Health: An Overview for Climate and Health Researchers

McGregor

Ebi

2018

Atmosphere

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Abstract:The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an important mode of climatic variability that exerts a discernible impact on ecosystems and society through alterations in climate patterns. For this reason, ENSO has attracted much interest in the climate and health science community, with many analysts investigating ENSO health links through considering the degree of dependency of the incidence of a range of climate diseases on the occurrence of El Niño events. Because of the mounting interest in the relationship between ENSO as a major mode of climatic variability and health, this paper presents an overview of the basic characteristics of the ENSO phenomenon and its climate impacts, discusses the use of ENSO indices in climate and health research, and outlines the present understanding of ENSO health associations. Also touched upon are ENSO-based seasonal health forecasting and the possible impacts of climate change on ENSO and the implications this holds for future assessments of ENSO health associations. The review concludes that there is still some way to go before a thorough understanding of the association between ENSO and health is achieved, with a need to move beyond analyses undertaken through a purely statistical lens, with due acknowledgement that ENSO is a complex non-canonical phenomenon, and that simple ENSO health associations should not be expected.

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“…El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant mode of interannual variability in the tropical Pacific12345, and a major source of climate predictability, large-scale teleconnections, and impacts worldwide6789. After several decades of intensive research, the main mechanisms explaining the dynamics of the phenomenon and the onset of El Niño (EN) and La Niña (LN) events are nowadays thought to be relatively well understood3101112.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensitivity of El Niño intensity and timing to preceding subsurface heat magnitude

Ballester

Petrova

Bordoni

et al. 2016

Sci Rep

Self Cite

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Despite extensive ongoing efforts on improving the long-term prediction of El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the predictability in state-of-the-art operational schemes remains limited by factors such as the spring barrier and the influence of atmospheric winds. Recent research suggests that the 2014/15 El Niño (EN) event was stalled as a result of an unusually strong basin-wide easterly wind burst in June, which led to the discharge of a large fraction of the subsurface ocean heat. Here we use observational records and numerical experiments to explore the sensitivity of EN to the magnitude of the heat buildup occurring in the ocean subsurface 21 months in advance. Our simulations suggest that a large increase in heat content during this phase can lead to basin-wide uniform warm conditions in the equatorial Pacific the winter before the occurrence of a very strong EN event. In our model configuration, the system compensates any initial decrease in heat content and naturally evolves towards a new recharge, resulting in a delay of up to one year in the occurrence of an EN event. Both scenarios substantiate the non-linear dependency between the intensity of the subsurface heat buildup and the magnitude and timing of subsequent EN episodes.

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Seasonal forecasting and health impact models: challenges and opportunities

Cited by 17 publications

References 98 publications

Impact of recent and future climate change on vector‐borne diseases

Impact of recent and future climate change on vector‐borne diseases

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Health: An Overview for Climate and Health Researchers

Sensitivity of El Niño intensity and timing to preceding subsurface heat magnitude

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