Dataset for Modeling Climate Change and Health in Uganda-East Africa

Climate change, that is a threat to ecosystems and the livelihoods of those that depend on them, is increasingly manifesting as an increased frequency and intensity of severe weather events such as droughts and floods (Déqué et al., 2017). Climate change has created an urgent need for early warning aids or models to enhance the sub-Saharan African health systems ability to prepare for, and cope with escalations in treatment needs of climate sensitive diseases (Nhamo & Muchuru, 2019). This dataset was created from the health and weather data of nine purposively selected study districts in Uganda, whose health and weather data were available for the development of an early warning health model (github.com) and an accompanying prediction web app (github.com). The districts were selected based on the following criteria: (a) were experiencing climate change and variability, (b) represented different climatologic, and agro-ecological zones, (c) availability of climate information and health information from a health facility within a 40 kilometres radius of a functional weather station. Historical weather data was retrieved from the Uganda National Meteorological Association databases, as monthly averages. The weather variables in this data included: atmospheric pressure, rainfall, solar radiation, humidity, temperature (maximum, minimum and mean), and wind (gusts and average wind speed). The monthly health aggregated data for the period starting September 2018 to December 2019, was retrieved from the National Health Repository (DHIS2) for referral hospitals within the selected districts. Only data for a selection of climate-sensitive disease aggregates was obtained. The dataset contains 436 complete matched disease and weather records. Ethical issues: Both the de-identified aggregate monthly disease diagnosis count data and weather data in this dataset are from national data available to the public on request.