AIM AND OBJECTIVES

Our objectives are:

• to characterize, through epidemiological analyses, the independent effects of ozone and heat on mortality, and to examine whether there is evidence of interaction between them in their health effects
• to explore the potential for analysing ozone and heat effects by spatio-temporal disaggregation of mortality data linked to similarly resolved pollution and meteorological data
• to examine, through chemistry-climate models, future changes in distributions of ozone concentrations (including exceedance patterns) and their relationship to temperature extremes and NOx emissions
• to explore the methods, assumptions and uncertainties in combining the results of 1 to 3 in order to quantify changes in future mortality burdens from ozone and high temperatures
• to propose a decision-analysis framework, integrating the results of 1 to 4, for evaluating the costs and benefits of policies aimed at reducing the adverse effects high temperature-ozone episodes

The proposed programme of research, to be developed through this and subsequent studies, will examine key elements in the causal chains shown schematically in Fig.1.