The Extreme Cold project is building a new, health‑informed decision support tool to help forecasters, emergency managers and community partners respond more effectively to extreme cold events.
Although Washington is traditionally temperate, extreme cold can cause significant health and infrastructure impacts. To address this, the project combines data analysis with community collaboration through the following activities:
- Analyzing health and weather data – integrating outcome-specific emergency department visit data with weather, sociodemographic and power outage data in a case-crossover design.
- Partnering with regional responders – facilitating discussions with meteorologists, emergency management, public health agencies, community-based organizations and other partners to collaboratively identify intervention points and response strategies.
- Interviewing decision makers – gathering insights from key informants across the region to understand how extreme cold decisions are made and where tools and information are most needed.
This research will contribute to the development of an extreme cold risk map proof-of-concept, which will communicate a geography’s risk of health impacts due to extreme cold based on meteorological scenarios and community risk profiles. This tool will combine local health impact data with actionable, locally relevant response recommendations to improve risk communication and preparedness. Our research will also inform weather decision-support tools produced by the NOAA Global Systems Laboratory.
Ultimately, this work builds a stronger regional response network and equips partners with practical tools to reduce the health impacts of extreme cold for communities across Washington.