Alphabet Inc.’s Google wants users of its search function to be alerted to dangerous conditions caused by extreme heat and will not only serve up news articles on severe weather, but will feed searchers region-specific safety recommendations.
Beginning later this year, users in the U.S. and elsewhere will see information about extreme temperatures in their area when they search relevant terms like “heat wave,” the company announced Wednesday.
The alert will provide information including when extreme heat is forecast to start and end in an area, along with local news about the event and recommendations for staying safe, which might include information on air-conditioned shelters or guidance for outdoor workers to seek shade and increase their intake of fluids.
Every year, extreme heat kills nearly 500,000 people globally, and heat-related deaths are on the rise.
To find out how to stay safe — or simply to satisfy their curiosity — people often turn to the internet with questions during extreme weather events. In July 2022, searches for information about heat waves reached a record high globally, according to Google
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data. In 2022, New York and Boston both experienced their earliest heat advisories on record.
A year earlier, in the summer of 2021, extreme temperatures killed some 600 people in the Pacific Northwest, where air-conditioning in homes is unusual. Record temperatures in Seattle melted power cables and buckled roads. That year featured eight days above 100 degrees F in Seattle, and the temperature in the city hit a record high of 108 degrees on July 28, 2021.
Periods of serious extreme heat are becoming more common in this northern coastal city, as the Seattle Times charted last July. In fact, 2015 had the most days on record when the thermometer spiked into the 90s or 100s, at 12 days. The year with the second-most such extreme days was 2018, at 11. Both 2021 and 2017 had eight days, and in 2016, there were seven.
Heat extremes are even riskier in some other parts of the world. A recent report by the World Bank cautioned that India could become one of the first places in the world where wet-bulb temperatures could soar past the survivability threshold of 35 degrees C, or 95 degrees F, for days at a time. Wet-bulb temperatures combine air temperature and relative humidity, which experts say provides a better gauge of heat stress on the human body.
And people may react differently to signs of heat danger than to other, more apparent perils, such as flooding.
“The question is, have we got inured to heat-led suffering?” said Abhas Jha, one of the authors of the World Bank report. “Because it’s not a sudden-onset disaster, because it is slow-onset, we don’t push back on it.”
Notification of heat extremes is not the only recent update to Google’s search-based alerts. The search engine also tracks wildfires with satellite imagery and employs machine learning to improve the accuracy of flood alerts, about which it then notifies its search users.
The company believes that as climate change makes severe weather more likely in areas not used to such events and worsens weather extremes generally, a search tool can serve as a direct way to prompt affected people to take action.
“We feel a great sense of responsibility as we continue to scale this work building on this type of alert,” Hema Budaraju, senior director of product for health and social impact at Google search, said at a press briefing.
Read: Climate change happening faster than globe can adapt, latest U.N. report warns
“Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation, which brings new and extreme weather events that many of us are learning how to adapt to,” she added.
Google will rely on the Global Heat Health Information Network to ensure that its information is relevant and accurate, it said.
This post was originally published on Market Watch
