Exertional heat illness poses a significant risk for workers, athletes, and military personnel participating in outdoor activities during hot weather. An important component of heat safety is monitoring environmental conditions through heat stress indices like the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), which accounts for factors such as air temperature, humidity, wind, and sunlight, and adjusting activity as conditions get progressively hotter.

Extreme heat directly impacts health and can exacerbate substance use. Rural communities face high risks due to those areas’ higher rates of heat-related hospitalizations and disproportionate effects of substance use. This commentary explores the connection between heat and substance use in rural communities and proposes policy, research, and practice recommendations that can be tailored to fit the local rural context.

The HeatWise Policy Partnership Summit is a key component of a cyclical two-year program that encompasses stakeholder engagement, event planning, biannual convening, reporting key findings, and outreach to policymakers.

Increasing temperature will impact future outdoor worker safety but quantifying this impact to develop local adaptations is challenging. Wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) is the preferred thermal index for regulating outdoor activities in occupational health, athletic, and military settings, but global circulation models have coarse spatiotemporal resolution and do not always provide outputs required to project the full diurnal range of WBGT. This article presents a novel method to project WBGT at local spatial and hourly temporal resolutions without many assumptions inherent in previous research.

With climate change driving more frequent and intense heat events, North Carolina's Heat Action Plan Toolkit aims to help communities adapt and build resilience to extreme heat. Primarily targeted for use by local governments, including health and emergency management departments, the toolkit focuses on approaches to reduce the human health impacts of increasing temperatures and heat waves.

The 2023 Durham Community Health Assessment was produced as part of the accreditation process for the Durham County Department of Public Health and Affordable Care Act requirements for Duke Health. Nicholas Institute experts Ashley Ward and Jordan Clark contributed to a section on extreme heat, highlighting the disparate impact of extreme heat on Durham residents and current and future resources to mitigate the worst impacts of extreme heat exposure.

This research assesses the accuracy of wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) forecasts. WBGT is a heat stress index that accounts for impacts of air temperature, humidity, wind, and radiation. It is widely used in occupational, athletic, and military settings for heat stress assessment, yet WBGT forecasting in the United States is a relatively new development. These forecasts can be used by decision-makers to better plan activities.

Wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) is a heat stress index that accounts for the effects of air temperature, humidity, wind, and radiation on humans. However, WBGT is not routinely measured at weather stations. This work demonstrated the accuracy of estimating WBGT with methods from Liljegren et al. (2008), finding it to be more accurate than measurements from a popular handheld meter, the Kestrel 5400 Heat Stress Tracker. Variations in WBGT that result in different danger levels were found between measurements over a tennis court and a neighboring grass field, and between sun and shade conditions. Understanding the magnitude of these differences and the biases with WBGT estimates and measurements can inform the planning of outdoor activity to robustly safeguard health.

Use of electric fans can help people stay cool if they can remain hydrated and if temperatures are low enough. Yet, there are limits to how hot it can be to safely use a fan—when temperatures are too high, a fan will increase the amount of heat traveling over the skin. We use data based on historical meteorological observations to study the number of hours in the continental US that exceed recommended temperature thresholds for safe fan use. We also examine where climate conditions considered unsafe for fan use overlap with socially vulnerable communities.

High school athletic associations (HSAAs) bear the responsibility of ensuring the health and safety of student-athletes. Exertional heat illness poses a significant risk, making this a task of increasing urgency in light of climate change and rising temperatures. This policy brief builds on prior research to offer recommendations to HSAAs as part of an ongoing commitment to safeguard student-athletes from heat-related illnesses.