REACH Center Exposure Assessment Core

PROJECT SUMMARY - EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT CORE The REACH Center Exposure Assessment Core aims to provide expertise and services on big data use, exposure assessment, and statistical analysis to support research exploring health and equity impacts of climate solutions. The Core will develop unique, new services and capabilities in selecting and using

appropriate techniques and tools to assess exposure for a variety of climate-health research applications, including epidemiology, risk analysis, burden of disease assessment, disease forecasting, future projections under emission scenarios, policy analysis, and equity analysis. Datasets and tools will include satellite remote

sensing, ground stationary and mobile monitoring, statistical and geophysical modeling, among other techniques. Specifically, the Core will build capacity among Center investigators to identify and select appropriate geospatial climate and environmental datasets. To do so, the Core will empower researchers to

identify important climate-relevant hazards with screening-level mapping tools and aid researchers in selecting fit-for-purpose geospatial climate and environmental datasets. The Core will also lower the barrier to using geospatial climate and environmental datasets in research exploring health and equity impacts of climate

solutions. This will be accomplished by spatially and temporally aligning climate and environmental data with health data, providing user guides with data descriptions and sample code, and providing consultation services for researchers to ask questions about applying the datasets. Finally, the Core will provide statistical support,

including comprehensive statistical analysis, data usage advisory and consultancy, and conducting statistical and collaborative research to advance beyond what is available in the current literature. The Exposure Assessment Core will bridge the gap between novel geospatial datasets and research on health-protective and

equitable climate solutions by making geospatial climate and environmental datasets more accessible, interoperable, and interpretable for health researchers. The Core enables the Center and the broader community to overcome a major challenge in climate and health research: that climate and environmental data

are often spatiotemporally mis-aligned with health data, are poorly accessible to researchers outside of geosciences, and come with various strengths, weaknesses, and uncertainties.