Heat Waves -- a hot topic in climate change research

TL;DR

This paper reviews the rapidly expanding scientific literature on heat waves, highlighting key events, affected regions, impacts, and future adaptation strategies within the context of climate change.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive overview of heat wave research, analyzing publication trends, thematic content, and identifying key influential works in the field.

Findings

Research on heat waves is rapidly growing, doubling every five years.

Major impacts include drought, urban heat islands, and increased mortality.

Key regions affected are the US, Europe, and Australia.

Abstract

Research on heat waves (periods of excessively hot weather, which may be accompanied by high humidity) is a newly emerging research topic within the field of climate change research with high relevance for the whole of society. In this study, we analyzed the rapidly growing scientific literature dealing with heat waves. No summarizing overview has been published on this literature hitherto. We developed a suitable search query to retrieve the relevant literature covered by the Web of Science (WoS) as complete as possible and to exclude irrelevant literature (n = 8,011 papers). The time-evolution of the publications shows that research dealing with heat waves is a highly dynamic research topic, doubling within about 5 years. An analysis of the thematic content reveals the most severe heat wave events within the recent decades (1995 and 2003), the cities and countries/regions affected (United States, Europe, and Australia), and the ecological and medical impacts (drought, urban heat islands, excess hospital admissions, and mortality). Risk estimation and future strategies for adaptation to hot weather are major political issues. We identified 104 citation classics which include fundamental early works of research on heat waves and more recent works (which are characterized by a relatively strong connection to climate change).