Thermal Trace - investigating heat and cold stress

A new tool which has been made using data from Copernicus data, going back to the 1940s.

The new Thermal Trace application, developed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and ECMWF*, allows us to explore, visualise, share and extract over 80 years of thermal stress data in a few seconds. As climate change is making heatwaves more frequent and intense, the application and dataset provide an intuitive, fast, flexible and free tool to understand and monitor heat and cold stress and their changes over time, with a focus on heat-health monitoring.

The UTCI represents the effect of the environment on people, taking into account temperature, humidity, wind speed, sunshine and heat emitted by the surroundings, and how the human body reacts to different thermal environments. UTCI has units of degrees Celsius, representing a "feels like" temperature.

There are various options within the tool.

Here's the heat stress at the time of checking, with a relatively cool day here in the UK.

Could use along with: Is the UK hot right now.

Here's a short explainer video on how it works.