As heatwaves become more frequent, city centre buildings will need to adapt. For investors in global cities, keeping a close eye on weather data will become vital.
As investors in global cities, we have been using planetary-scale environmental geospatial data since 2019.
We have been continuously investigating and mining datasets more commonly found in academic research – including those published by space agencies such as NASA – to tease out the key environmental risks of our investments.
Our data stack covers a wide range of risk indicators. These include the fire weather index for wildfires; historical tropical storm incidence; lightning flash density; landslide risk; flooding, and more – at varying degrees of geographic detail, adding up to many billions of datapoints.
The number of recent heatwaves in Europe shows just how important being aware of these environmental risks is. Fine-grained weather data is an asset that Schroders has invested in for many years.
We have access to weather data across the planet at every 30-kilometre interval, with variables such as temperature and rainfall gathered each hour. This helps us to visualise the recent European heatwaves for some of the top cities in that region. Our environmental data helps us analyse the historical context of the heat and understand how unusual recent events were.
To put this extreme event in context, we can plot all the July days experienced in all the European Global Cities over the last 10 years on one histogram, and then pick out the recent London heatwave from the distribution. The approximately 36.5°C recorded in London on 18 July 2022 was hotter than 98% of all July days in European Global Cities over the last 10 years, and 19 July, at around 39°C, was hotter than 99%.
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