Lucian Sfîcă1, Mihai Bulai This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.1 , Vlad-Alexandru Amihăesei1,2, Constantin Ion3, Marius Ștefan3 1 Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania, Faculty of Geography and Geology, 700506 Iași, Romania
2 National Meteorological Administration of Romania, 013686 Bucharest, Romania
3 Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania, Faculty of Biology, 700506 Iași, Romania
Received:
May 8, 2020
Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.
Revised:
July 16, 2020
Accepted:
July 20, 2020
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||https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2020.05.0206
Sfîcă, L., Bulai, M., Amihăesei, V. A., Ion, C. and Ștefa, M. (2020). Weather Conditions (with Focus on UV Radiation) Associated with COVID-19 Outbreak and Worldwide Climate-based Prediction for Future Prevention. Aerosol Air Qual. Res. 20: 1862–1873. https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2020.05.0206
Cite this article:
Respiratory infectious diseases are highly influenced by climate and feature seasonality, whose peak is December to February in the Northern Hemisphere. SARS-CoV-2 produced consistent debate regarding the relationship between its emergence and weather conditions. Our study explored these conditions, expressed by three main parameters—ultraviolet radiation, air temperature and relative humidity—that characterized Hubei (China), the source region of COVID-19 pandemic, in November 2019–March 2020. During COVID-19 outbreak, the low amounts of UV radiation (down to –273 kJ m–2 in January 2020) were associated with the early stage environmental survival of the novel coronavirus. As well, this period was characterized by a high relative humidity during peak hours of the day, and a positive air temperature anomaly (+1.7°C in December 2019), which also favored the outdoor people mobility in winter. Based on Hubei analysis, a presumed optimal weather frame was set in order to identify other world regions with similar weather characteristics. In brief, the „Hubei weather profile” was recorded in those regions of COVID-19 outbreak in February 2020, such as northern Iran, Italy or Spain. Our results, which focused on the role of the UV solar radiation, could be used as a prediction tool for identifying the world regions with a higher risk of future faster increase in COVID-19 cases.HIGHLIGHTS
ABSTRACT
Keywords:
COVID-19; UV radiation; Air temperature; Relative humidity; Climate change.
Aerosol Air Qual. Res. 20 :1862 -1873 . https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2020.05.0206