Classification of daily weather types in Colombia: a tool to evaluate human health risks due to temperature variability

The building of knowledge about current risks from changes in air temperature has been established as critical for informing the starting point for human health risk assessments in a climate-changing world. The study presented in this paper provides the application of the maximum/minimum temperature complex method in Colombia to identify the simultaneous behavior of daily extremes of air temperature and provide a tool to assess human health risks due to temperature variability. An established classification of mean temperatures exists for the country, and maximum and minimum temperatures have been studied but never as simultaneous variables. The max/min temperature complex analysis aims to describe the air temperature regime of a particular place by studying the frequency of simultaneous occurrence of extreme daily temperatures. The study consisted of the construction of a contingency table that combines the behavior of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures using a subdivision of 5 degrees C intervals. A 5-year (2010-2015)-long dataset of 171 weather stations from the entire territory was prepared by identifying, filtering, and completing the missing data. Frequencies of occurrence of each interval were arranged in descending order to select the intervals of frequencies above 10%. Then, they were classified into categories, types, and subtypes. Six categories, seven types, and fifty-one subtypes were identified and mapped to ascertain their geographical distribution. In contrast with other climate regime classifications, our study found a regionalization of daily extremes of temperature that can be analyzed in different scales of time and space to aid health risk analysis.