Tenki
Online ISSN : 2434-1185
Print ISSN : 0546-0921
Volume 66, Issue 8
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  • Fumiaki FUJIBE, Jun MATSUMOTO, Hideto SUZUKI
    2019 Volume 66 Issue 8 Pages 513-527
    Published: 2019
    Released on J-STAGE: September 30, 2019
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

     Using Vital Statistics data of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan, regional and temporal features of cold mortality were analyzed with relation to temperature variations. For 16,573 deaths from “exposure to excessive natural cold (X31)” that is based on the Tenth International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), mortality in each of the 47 prefectures was calculated after adjusting for differences in the age structure among prefectures and years. It was found that cold mortality is higher by about 12% in a prefecture where climatic-mean winter (December-March) temperature was 1℃ lower. For seasonal and interannual variations, the four months from December to March account for 78% of the annual cold mortality, and a winter of 1℃ lower mean temperature (December-March) has a higher cold mortality by about 20%. On a daily time scale, cold mortality is found to increase by about 15% for a 1℃ difference of daily mean temperature. These results indicate that cold mortality is dependent on climatological and meteorological conditions in each region and on a daily to yearly time scales, although the dependence is weaker than that of heat-stroke mortality.

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