Data-driven estimation of the onset of heat-related mortality in five Indian cities

A data-driven framework estimates city-specific onset temperatures for heat-related excess mortality in Ahmedabad, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai, finding onset at substantially lower temperatures than operational heat-wave definitions.

• Why it matters: Operational heat-wave thresholds are meteorological and may miss the epidemiologically relevant temperature level where mortality risk begins to rise, limiting early warning and planning.
• What they did: Using daily mortality and temperature time series from 2001–2018 across five Indian cities, the study fit a likelihood-based structured model to infer the temperature where heat mortality first exceeds seasonal background.
• The result: Across all five cities, the inferred onset thresholds were lower than meteorological criteria, enabling more stable confidence intervals and estimating a larger heat-associated excess-death burden than standard definitions capture.

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