thermofeel

[!IMPORTANT] This software is Graduated and subject to ECMWF's guidelines on Software Maturity.

thermofeel (pronounced thermo-feel)

A library to calculate human thermal comfort indices.

Currently calculates the thermal indices:

• Universal Thermal Climate Index
• Apparent Temperature
• Apparent Temperature (radiation)
• Heat Index Adjusted
• Heat Index Simplified
• Humidex
• Discomfort Index
• Summer Simmer Index
• Normal Effective Temperature
• Relative Strain Index
• Wet Bulb Globe Temperature
• Wet Bulb Globe Temperature Simple
• Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (Liljegren method)
• Heat Force (KNMI 0–10 heat-stress scale)
• Excess Heat Factor and Excess Cold Factor
• Predicted Mean Vote and Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied (PMV/PPD)
• Wind Chill

In support of the above indices, it also calculates:

• Globe Temperature
• Mean Radiant Temperature
• Mean Radiant Temperature from Globe Temperature
• Relative Humidity Percentage
• Saturation vapour pressure
• Wet Bulb Temperature

The thermofeel.approximations namespace additionally provides clearly-labelled estimators (currently the direct solar radiation fdir from global radiation, via the Erbs 1982 or DISC/Maxwell 1987 models) for datasets that lack an input that a radiation index needs.

PyPI

Install with:

pip install thermofeel

System dependencies

thermofeel core functions depend on:

• numpy

Optionally, thermofeel depends on:

• pytest — for unit testing

Release notes

Version 2.2 adds the physically based Liljegren Wet Bulb Globe Temperature and the KNMI 0–10 Heat Force scale, the Excess Heat / Excess Cold Factors, inline type hints with a py.typed marker, and raises the minimum Python to 3.10. See the ChangeLog for the full list.

Thermofeel 2.0 brings a number of changes to the underlying code but most importantly to the API.

Consequently, downstream packages using thermofeel 1.* will require code changes to migrate to version 2.0 and beyond.

The main changes are:

• standardisation of input and output variables
• standardisation of variable names
• removal of dependency on numba for code acceleration
• removal of solar zenith angle calculation (now provided by earthkit-meteo)
• several bug fixes and improvements

Please consult the ChangeLog for more details.

Contributing

The main repository is hosted on GitHub. Testing, bug reports and contributions are highly welcomed and appreciated.

Please see the Contributing document for the best way to help.

Current developers:

• Claudia Di Napoli — ECMWF
• Tiago Quintino — ECMWF

See also the contributors for a more complete list.

License

Copyright 2021 European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

In applying this licence, ECMWF does not waive the privileges and immunities granted to it by virtue of its status as an intergovernmental organisation nor does it submit to any jurisdiction.

Citing

In publications, please use our paper in SoftwareX as the main citation for thermofeel:

Brimicombe, C., Di Napoli, C., Quintino, T., Pappenberger, F., Cornforth, R., & Cloke, H. L. (2022). Thermofeel: A python thermal comfort indices library. SoftwareX, 18, 101005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2022.101005

To cite thermofeel the code currently please use:

Brimicombe, C., Di Napoli, C., Quintino, T., Pappenberger, F., Cornforth, R., & Cloke, H. L. (2021). thermofeel: a python thermal comfort indices library https://doi.org/10.21957/mp6v-fd16

Acknowledgements

Past and current funding and support for thermofeel is listed in the adjoining Acknowledgements.