A Duke Global Health Institute Initiative
Learn & Build
Tutorials, vignettes, methods explainers, and learning materials for climate-health data work.
A core goal of CGHI is to lower the barrier for health researchers to work with climate and environmental data. These resources are designed to provide practical, hands-on guidance — from understanding data sources and conventions to using CGHI’s open-source tools for data processing and analysis.
Resources are organized by topic and difficulty level. This page focuses on materials that are already usable now, plus a short list of recurring topic areas that often come up in CGHI work. If there is something you want to see added, contact us to suggest topics.
These guides are designed for the common situation where someone has a climate question but is not yet sure which version of the variable is appropriate. Each page explains the tradeoffs and includes an interactive recommendation builder.
| Variable | Best For | Common Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Heat | Choosing among air temperature, heat index, WBGT, UTCI, and time or space aggregation choices. | Heat stress, outdoor thermal burden, worker safety, mapping, public-health exposure windows. |
| Wind Speed | Choosing among sustained wind, gusts, directional summaries, threshold metrics, and exposure-aware wind framing. | Hazard, dispersion, operations, ventilation, roughness, gust versus mean wind interpretation. |
| Rainfall | Choosing among event totals, short-duration intensity, antecedent wetness, and flood-relevant threshold framing. | Runoff, pluvial flooding, river flooding, agriculture, rarity and recurrence interpretation. |
Introductory materials for health researchers who are new to working with climate and environmental data.
Longer applied tutorials for learners who are ready to work through code, prepared outputs, and a final analytic decision product.
Hands-on walkthroughs for CGHI's open-source R packages.
These themes are covered inside the resources above rather than maintained as separate pages. Use the links below to jump to the closest available material.
Have a topic you’d like to see covered? Want to contribute a tutorial or vignette? We welcome suggestions and collaborations.
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