THERMORA / Planetary heat intelligence

The planet is heating.Our responsestarts earlier.

Transforming environmental signals into actionable heatwave early warnings and human thermal stress insights, helping communities understand heat risk and prepare for extreme conditions.

Extreme heat · Thermal stress · Early warning

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02Environmental signals

Every heat crisisbegins as a signal.

THERMORA reads daily point observations from NASA's POWER service for every ward centroid. Four of its parameters shape human heat stress directly. Each one has a precise, documented role in the calculation.

T2M · T2M_MAX · T2M_MIN

Air temperature

°C at 2 m

Drives all three indices

Feeds the Rothfusz Heat Index, the WBGT wet-bulb and globe terms and the UTCI approximation. It also anchors the 3-day and 7-day anomaly features of the forecast.

RH2M

Relative humidity

% at 2 m

Limits evaporative cooling

Enters the Heat Index regression and scales the wet-bulb estimate, T × (0.45 + 0.55 × RH). Moist air makes the same temperature physiologically harsher.

WS2M

Wind speed

m/s at 2 m

The protective signal

Cools the globe term by 0.5 °C per m/s (capped at 6 m/s) and lowers UTCI by 2.265 °C per m/s above 0.5 m/s. Still air is weighted as added stress.

ALLSKY_SFC_SW_DWN

Solar radiation

W/m², daily mean

Radiant heat load

Converted from MJ/m²/day. Adds up to 8 °C to the black-globe temperature and 12 °C to mean radiant temperature per 1000 W/m², raising stress beyond air temperature.

Surface pressure (PS) and precipitation (PRECTOTCORR) are stored with every observation but do not enter the HTSI formula.

Source: NASA POWER, daily point API, community AG

03Understanding heat risk

A heatwave is a pattern,not a single hot day.

The forecasting stack labels a day as part of a heatwave when temperature stays at or above the location's 90th percentile for at least three consecutive days. It learns that pattern from rolling 3-day and 7-day means, temperature anomalies, humidity trends and the seasonal cycle.

Designed ensemble

Three models, one probability

Tree models read 13 engineered features. The LSTM reads 7-day sequences of temperature, humidity, wind and solar radiation. Their probabilities are blended, with confidence decaying by 4% per forecast day after the first, never below 60%.

XGBoost

45% weight

Random Forest

30% weight

LSTM

25% weight

P(heatwave)

  • XGBoost400 trees, depth 5, learning rate 0.05
  • Random Forest300 trees, depth 10, balanced classes
  • LSTM2 layers, 32 hidden units, 7-day sequences

Running in this deployment

The transparent fallback

The trained model files come from a separate Python training job. Where they are absent, the original code switches to a physically grounded logistic curve on the recent temperature anomaly, and that is what produces every forecast you see here.

P = 1 / (1 + e−(Δ − 3) / 2)

Δ = mean of last 3 days − mean of the 30-day window, P clipped to 1% to 99%

LowModerateHighExtreme0%25%50%75%100%-4°C0°C+3°C+6°C+9°C+12°Cmidpoint +3 °C3-day mean minus window mean (°C)

In fallback mode every forecast day receives the same probability, and the three model fields report that same value. No accuracy figure is published for either path.

04Human thermal stress

Temperature tells a story.Human thermal stress tells us why it matters.

The Human Thermal Stress Index (HTSI) folds three established biometeorological indices into one 0 to 100 score, then adjusts it for the person exposed: age, chronic illness, outdoor work and hours in the sun. Heat Index, WBGT and UTCI stay distinct inputs, each with its own scale.

Heat Index ring, 40%WBGT ring, 35%UTCI ring, 25%

Live result

—/ 100 HTSI
No data
Heat Index
—°C
WBGT
—°C
UTCI
—°C

Try the engine

Set the conditions

Every change is sent to the same calculation the dashboard uses. Nothing here is precomputed.

41.0 °C
38 %
1.5 m/s
720 W/m²

How the score is built

Heat Index

40%

NOAA/NWS Rothfusz regression

Scaled 0 to 100 over 27 to 54 °C

WBGT

35%

Outdoor approximation with solar load and wind cooling

Scaled 0 to 100 over 23 to 35 °C

UTCI

25%

Reduced first-order polynomial approximation

Scaled 0 to 100 over 26 to 46 °C

HTSI = min(100, (0.40 HI + 0.35 WBGT + 0.25 UTCI) × vulnerability), where vulnerability adds 0.15 for age 65+ or 5 and under, 0.15 for chronic illness, 0.10 for outdoor work, 0.03 for women and 0.03 per hour of sun beyond two (up to 0.25).

Risk classes

  • Safe0 to 30
  • Caution30 to 55
  • Danger55 to 80
  • Extreme Danger80 to 100

HTSI is a planning signal, not a medical diagnosis or a guarantee of safety.

05Early warning

From a readingto a warning,in six stages.

This is the pipeline as implemented in the platform's code, including where it currently runs on demonstration data and where an external key switches on a live feed.

  1. 01

    Environmental signals

    Daily temperature, humidity, wind and solar radiation for each ward centroid. A forward 5-day leg can be added from OpenWeather when an API key is configured.

    • NASA POWER daily point API
    • OpenWeather 3-hourly forecast, aggregated per day
  2. 02

    Data acquisition

    Ingestion requests the last 30 days for a ward, allowing for NASA POWER's two-day latency, converts solar energy to W/m² and stores every day as an observation.

    • POST /api/weather/ward/{id}/ingest
    • Seeded demo history: 45 synthetic days per ward
  3. 03

    Data processing

    Rolling 3-day and 7-day means, the temperature anomaly against the expanding mean, a humidity trend and a cyclic day-of-year encoding form the model inputs.

    • 13 tabular features
    • 7-day sequences for the LSTM
  4. 04

    Heat-risk assessment

    Each ward receives an HTSI score with a driver breakdown, a 5-day heatwave probability with severity and duration, and a hospital surge estimate.

    • HTSI 0 to 100 in four classes
    • Forecast severity: Low, Moderate, High, Extreme
  5. 05

    Early warning

    When a ward's HTSI reaches the alert threshold of 55, the alert engine issues a warning with its recommended action. A refresh job recomputes every ward from its latest observation, designed to run every 30 minutes.

    • ALERT_RISK_THRESHOLD = 55
    • Alerts expire after 12 hours
  6. 06

    Actionable information

    Alerts fan out to people registered in the ward by push, email, SMS and WhatsApp. Each channel sends only when its provider is configured and otherwise logs a dry run.

    • Cooling-center finder and health guidance
    • District overviews for officers
06Intelligence dashboard

Read straight fromthe platform, right now.

The panel below is not a mockup. It queries the same service as the dashboard and labels where every number comes from, including when that source is demonstration data.

thermora / live readout

connected

Highest HTSI, all wards

Selected ward

—
No data
Heat Index
— °C
WBGT
— °C
UTCI
— °C

Air temperature, last 0 observations

Source: …Forecast engine: …
07The human impact

Heat is felt by people,not by averages.

These are the settings THERMORA was designed to support. They describe intended applications, not verified deployments or measured outcomes.

A city skyline rising out of a warm, hazy cloud layer at sunrise

Urban heat-risk awareness

Dense, paved wards hold heat longer. The map ranks every ward so attention goes where stress is highest.

A site engineer in a hard hat and high-visibility vest crossing a sunlit street

Outdoor worker safety planning

Exposure hours and outdoor work raise the personal multiplier, and Danger-level guidance calls for work-rest cycles.

Community heat preparedness

Ward-level HTSI and plain-language guidance help residents see when ordinary days become dangerous, and where the nearest cooling center is.

Health guidance · Cooling-center finder

Emergency-response planning

Surge estimates for heat-stroke cases, admissions and ICU demand, alongside staged playbooks, give planners a common picture before a heat event peaks.

Hospital surge · Emergency playbooks

Environmental monitoring

Daily observations, thresholds and alert history per ward make heat stress something that can be tracked over time instead of reported after the fact.

Alerts · Thresholds · Weather history

Climate-data analysis and research

Every formula, weight and threshold is documented, so results can be inspected, challenged and recalibrated against local data.

Methodology · Open API

08About THERMORA

Earlier warnings,clearer reasons.

THERMORA is an extreme-heat early-warning and human thermal stress intelligence platform, built for a Smart India Hackathon problem statement on urban heatwave risk management. It turns meteorological data into ward-level heat-risk intelligence for disaster-management authorities and citizens, starting from a default area of interest in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh.

It is a decision-support tool. It does not issue official meteorological warnings, and its outputs are not medical advice.

Show the source

Every reading is labelled with where it came from and when, including when it is demonstration data.

Explain the score

Each HTSI value ships with its drivers, and every weight and threshold is published on the methodology page.

Never fill gaps

Missing or unavailable data is shown as missing. Nothing on the platform is estimated to make a panel look complete.

Current coverage

States and districts loaded in the platform today. Ward boundaries are approximated as squares around each centroid until official boundaries are attached.