Abstract
The outdoor environment influences human beings differently. If it is too cold for the organism, that could cause frostbite, freezing and other dangerous health conditions. On the other hand, if it is too hot, the heat stress could become too high, and consequences such as heat stroke, fainting, etc. could emerge. In either case, the outdoor environment could become deadly for humans. The climate changes impose an adaptation of the human individuals to the current and the future thermal conditions. The current research aims to study the risk of extreme heat and cold thermal stress on the Balkan Peninsula and some adjacent territories. For that purpose, we performed numerical simulations with the regional climate model RegCM4 for the period from 1975 to 2005. The initial and boundary conditions were taken from the HadGEM2 Earth System Model. The simulations were performed on the supercomputer Avitohol of IICT—BAS. We studied the extreme thermal conditions in the cold and the warm seasons with two different biometeorological indexes. The first one describes how cold the human individual feels in low temperatures and windy environment. The second one describes how hot the human being feels in high temperatures and humid conditions. The simulation results for the influence of the current climate on human beings are demonstrated in the paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been accomplished with the financial support by the Grant No BG05M2OP001-1.001-0003, financed by the Science and Education for Smart Growth Operational Program (2014–2020) and co-financed by the European Union through the European structural and Investment funds. This work has been carried out in the framework of the National Science Program ‘Environmental Protection and Reduction of Risks of Adverse Events and Natural Disasters’ approved by the Resolution of the Council of Ministers 577/17.08.2018 and supported by the Ministry of Education and Science (MES) of Bulgaria (Agreement D01–230/06.12.2018). This work was partially supported by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science under the National Research Programme ‘Young scientists and postdoctoral students’ approved by DCM 577 / 17.08.2018.
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Ivanov, V., Valcheva, R., Gadzhev, G. (2021). HPC Simulations of the Extreme Thermal Conditions in the Balkan Region with RegCM4. In: Dimov, I., Fidanova, S. (eds) Advances in High Performance Computing. HPC 2019. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 902. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55347-0_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55347-0_27
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