How hot and humid will your city be in the future? by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Climate change is likely to contribute to more hot and humid days across Canada, but every region is different. To help readers gauge just how hot it could feel in their area, CBC News crunched the latest humidex projections so users could enter their postal code to see how hot and humid it could get where they live.

The project showcases the same humidex data in multiple ways. Readers get a personalized summary based on their postal code, a map timelapse to show humidex numbers nationally, a table with danger levels and an interactive calculator. This variety of format helps the user understand what is at stake, with the various dimensions of the data being explored in different ways.

The humidex is a uniquely Canadian way of calculating how hot it feels when the air temperature is combined with humidity.

A humidex above 35 is considered to be high for the average healthy adult, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. Humidity makes heat especially dangerous at a point called the wet-bulb temperature. Humans cool down by sweating, releasing heat through evaporation. When the air is saturated with moisture, that process doesn’t work as well.

The humidex data used in the project came from the Power Analytics and Visualization for Climate Science (PAVICS) platform, which contains projections from 30-year averages from the CMIP6, the most current global climate model data available. The historical data goes from 1950 to 2014. The projections start in 2015 and end in 2100.

There are three emissions scenarios in this project: high emissions (CMIP6 SSP 5-8.5), medium emissions (CMIP6 SSP 2-4.5) and low emissions (CMIP6 SSP 1-2.6).