ANALYSIS OF HEAT WAVE IN GUJARAT USING NWS WEATHER DATA

Abstract

Excessive heat is a primary cause of weather-related fatalities worldwide. Excessive heat experience can lead to a number of detrimental heat-health impacts on workers. On the basis of Temperature, Relative Humidity and Precipitation of the region heat index is developed to estimate thermal comfort for workers. It has been investigated changes in day time Temperature, Relative humidity and Heat Index over the period of 2010-2014 for Gujarat, India. Gujarat has primarily sub-humid, arid and tropical climate. Addition of humidity with warm temperature makes the weather hotter and becomes unhealthy. NCEP climate data has been used for the study purpose from 2010 to 2014. Heat index method has been used in order to identify the apparent temperature over the region. All the data processing and layers generation has been done in GIS environment of ArcGIS. Layers for temperature, relative humidity and heat index are generated through the IDW interpolation of NCEP gridded data. Data were analyzed over the region and findings were consistent with the local environment and urbanization. As the precipitation increases, temperature decreases significantly in southern part and HI is low. In central and north Gujarat HI shows high values owing to moderate temperature. In July the whole Gujarat experiences high humidity whereas RH exceeds 80% in coastal areas. With continues rainfall in region, southern part of Gujarat has heat index values below 80°F. The temperature in these regions is low but humidity shows moderate values. In northern parts like Kutch, Banaskantha, Patan, Mehsana etc. has heat index values between 106-130°F. In July the whole Gujarat experiences low temperature (below 90°F).At this time of year the monsoon reaches eastern part of Gujarat which resultant in extreme value of humidity. But temperature decrease in that region due to this we find HI values are below 90°F in east Gujarat. In desert region of Gujarat has no rainfall occurred at that time of year that’s why we have high HI values in Kutch region. As the monsoon winds moved over the Gujarat region we again find high HI values in most parts of Gujarat. Coastal region of Gujarat has low temperature either due to postmonsoon rainfall or local climate changes which results local precipitation. But in northern region of Gujarat where air is mostly dries and we found low RH values and high Temperature. As correspondences HI values are higher in north Gujarat.