Explorer Current and future climate - and air pollution - mediated impacts on human health

Background: We describe a project to quantify the burden of heat and ozone on mortality in the UK, both for the present-day and under future emission scenarios. Methods: Mortality burdens attributable to heat and ozone exposure are estimated by combination of climate-chemistry modelling and epidemiological risk assessment. Weather forecasting models (WRF) are used to simulate the driving meteorology for the EMEP4UK chemistry transport model at 5 km by 5 km horizontal resolution across the UK; the coupled WRFEMEP4UK model is used to simulate daily surface temperature and ozone concentrations for the years 2003, 2005 and 2006, and for future emission scenarios. The outputs of these models are combined with evidence on the ozone-mortality and heat-mortality relationships derived from epidemiological analyses (time series regressions) of daily mortality in 15 UK conurbations, 19932003, to quantify present-day health burdens. Results: During the August 2003 heatwave period, elevated ozone concentrations > 200 μg m-3 were measured at sites in London and elsewhere. This and other ozone photochemical episodes cause breaches of the UK air quality objective for ozone. Simulations performed with WRFEMEP4UK reproduce the August 2003 heatwave temperatures and ozone concentrations. There remains day-to-day variability in the high ozone concentrations during the heatwave period, which on some days may be explained by ozone import from the European continent. Preliminary calculations using extended time series of spatially-resolved WRF-EMEP4UK model output suggest that in the summers (May to September) of 2003, 2005 & 2006 over 6000 deaths from Joint Environment and Human Health Programme: Annual Science Day Conference and Workshop Birmingham, UK. 24-25 February 2009 Published: 21 December 2009 Environmental Health 2009, 8(Suppl 1):S8 doi:10.1186/1476-069X-8-S1-S8 Proceedings of the Joint Environment and Human Health Programme: Annual Science Day Conference and Workshop Michael N Moore and Pamela D Kempton Publication of this supplement was made possible with support from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Environment Agency (EA), Department of the Environment & Rural Affairs (Defra), Ministry of Defence (MOD), Medical Research Council (MRC), The Wellcome Trust, Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), Biotechnology and Biological Scienc s Research Council (BBSRC), Engine ring and Physical Scie ces Research Council (EPSRC) a d Health Protection Agency (HPA). sponsor> Proceedings http://www.biomedc ntral.com/c ntent/pdf/1476-069X-8-s1-info.pdf This article is available from: http://www.ehjournal.net/content/8/S1/S8 © 2009 Doherty et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Environmental Health 2009, 8(Suppl 1):S8 http://www.ehjournal.net/content/8/S1/S8