SPH Receives $1.5 Million to Study Impact of Extreme Weather on Health Outcomes

ALBANY, N.Y. (Oct. 28, 2022) - Professor Shao Lin (PI) from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences has been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institute on Aging to study weather extremes, natural disasters, and health outcomes among vulnerable older adults.

The funding will support work to better understand how multiple meteorological factors—heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, storms, and power outages, to name a few—may jointly affect the health of aging populations, along with how health effects may differ as the seasons change.

"Climate change has made extreme weather-related disasters more frequent and severe,” Lin explains. “The impact can be dire, especially for those with low socioeconomic status and minority populations, who are disproportionately vulnerable to disaster hazards due to lack of access to the necessary resources for hazard mitigation or adaptation.”

Lin will lead a team of interdisciplinary researchers to generate high-resolution weather data, evaluate the effects of the weather on various diseases and injuries— including those that most commonly affect older adults— and assess the impact of various protective measures against negative health outcomes. In addition, the team will look at how the COVID-19 pandemic may affect the impact of extreme weather-related disasters on health.

The weather data for the project will come from the New York State Mesonet, a network of 126 weather stations across New York designed, installed, and operated by the University at Albany as a part of the New York State Early Warning Weather Detection System. Data from 2001-2020 on hospitalization and emergency department visits due to CVD, respiratory diseases, neurological conditions, mental health, injuries, and renal diseases among older adults will be examined.

“We know that disparities exist when it comes to the impact of extreme weather, so what is needed now is a much more comprehensive way to effectively address these disparities, by considering social and contextual influences on both exposure and health responses to extreme weather-related disasters,” says Lin. “Our results will serve as the basis for the development of effective communication strategies to do just that.”

Lin’s project will bring together experts from across UAlbany, including DeeDee Bennett Gayle and Eric Stern from the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, Xiaobo Xue Romeiko, Jennifer Manganello, Mary Riley-Jacome and Gus Birkhead from School of Public Health, and Samantha Friedman from the Department of Sociology. It will also pull on Lin’s continued partnership with climate science expert Scott Sheridan from Kent State University and statistician Howard Chang from Emory University. Multiple government agencies— including the New York State Department of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration— will support and serve as consultants on Lin’s project.

The first annual report from this work will be available in April 2023.