Luke Parsons CV

Journal Article Earth S Future · November 1, 2025 Migrant laborers typically work long hours at physically demanding tasks without air conditioning, and they account for a considerable fraction of India's population—a share that is increasing with urban growth. However, changes in heat stress and labor ca ... Full text Cite

Nonstationary Teleconnections Over North America Revealed in Paleoclimate Data Assimilation Reconstructions Spanning the Last Millennium

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres · November 28, 2024 Modes of climate variability, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO), have been shown to have large impacts on North American hydroclimate through their atmospheric t ... Full text Cite

Impact of Wildfire Smoke on Acute Illness.

Journal Article Anesthesiology · October 1, 2024 Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Impacts of warming on outdoor worker well-being in the tropics and adaptation options

Journal Article One Earth · March 15, 2024 Over a billion outdoor workers live in the tropics, where nearly a fifth of all hours in the year are hot and humid enough to exceed recommended safety thresholds for workers conducting heavy labor. Reviews have focused on heat impacts on worker health, we ... Full text Open Access Cite

Premature Deaths Due To Heat Exposure: The Potential Effects of Neighborhood-Level Versus City-Level Acclimatization Within US Cities.

Journal Article GeoHealth · January 2024 For the population of a given US city, the risk of premature death associated with heat exposure increases as temperatures rise, but risks in hotter cities are generally lower than in cooler cities at equivalent temperatures due to factors such as acclimat ... Full text Cite

Reductions in premature deaths from heat and particulate matter air pollution in South Asia, China, and the United States under decarbonization.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2024 Following a sustainable development pathway designed to keep warming below 2 °C will benefit human health. We quantify premature deaths attributable to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution and heat exposures for China, South Asia, and t ... Full text Cite

The important role of African emissions reductions in projected local rainfall changes

Journal Article Npj Climate and Atmospheric Science · December 1, 2023 Africa is highly vulnerable to climate change but emits a small portion of global greenhouse gases. Additionally, decarbonization might lead to a ‘climate penalty’ whereby reductions in cooling aerosols offset temperature benefits from CO2 reduc ... Full text Cite

Geophysical Uncertainties in Air Pollution Exposure and Benefits of Emissions Reductions for Global Health

Journal Article Earth S Future · September 1, 2023 Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution is associated with large-scale health consequences, but the ranges in estimates of global air pollution exposure and PM2.5-related global premature mortality remain understudie ... Full text Cite

Higher Temperatures in Socially Vulnerable US Communities Increasingly Limit Safe Use of Electric Fans for Cooling.

Journal Article Geohealth · August 2023 As the globe warms, people will increasingly need affordable, safe methods to stay cool and minimize the worst health impacts of heat exposure. One of the cheapest cooling methods is electric fans. Recent research has recommended ambient air temperature th ... Full text Link to item Cite

Premature Deaths in Africa Due To Particulate Matter Under High and Low Warming Scenarios.

Journal Article GeoHealth · May 2022 Sustainable development and climate change mitigation can provide enormous public health benefits via improved air quality, especially in polluted areas. We use the latest state-of-the-art composition-climate model simulations to contrast human exposure to ... Full text Open Access Cite

Last Millennium ENSO Diversity and North American Teleconnections: New Insights From Paleoclimate Data Assimilation

Journal Article Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology · March 1, 2022 El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability affects year-to-year changes in North American hydroclimate. Extra-tropical teleconnections are not always consistent between El Niño events due to stochastic atmospheric variability and diverse sea surface t ... Full text Open Access Cite

Consistent cooling benefits of silvopasture in the tropics.

Journal Article Nature communications · February 2022 Agroforestry systems have the potential to sequester carbon and offer numerous benefits to rural communities, but their capacity to offer valuable cooling services has not been quantified on continental scales. Here, we find that trees in pasturelands ("si ... Full text Open Access Cite

Global labor loss due to humid heat exposure underestimated for outdoor workers

Journal Article Environmental Research Letters · January 1, 2022 Humid heat impacts a large portion of the world's population that works outdoors. Previous studies have quantified humid heat impacts on labor productivity by relying on exposure response functions that are based on uncontrolled experiments under a limited ... Full text Open Access Cite

Tropical deforestation accelerates local warming and loss of safe outdoor working hours

Journal Article One Earth · December 17, 2021 Climate change has increased heat exposure in many parts of the tropics, negatively impacting outdoor worker productivity and health. Although it is known that tropical deforestation is associated with local warming, the extent to which this additional hea ... Full text Open Access Cite

Increased labor losses and decreased adaptation potential in a warmer world.

Journal Article Nature communications · December 2021 Working in hot and potentially humid conditions creates health and well-being risks that will increase as the planet warms. It has been proposed that workers could adapt to increasing temperatures by moving labor from midday to cooler hours. Here, we use r ... Full text Open Access Cite

Temporal and spatial distribution of health, labor, and crop benefits of climate change mitigation in the United States.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · November 2021 Societal benefits from climate change mitigation accrue via multiple pathways. We examine the US impacts of emission changes on several factors that are affected by both climate and air quality responses. Nationwide benefits through midcentury stem primari ... Full text Open Access Cite

Do Multi-Model Ensembles Improve Reconstruction Skill in Paleoclimate Data Assimilation?

Journal Article Earth and Space Science · April 1, 2021 Reconstructing past climates remains a difficult task because pre-instrumental observational networks are composed of geographically sparse and noisy paleoclimate proxy records that require statistical techniques to inform complete climate fields. Traditio ... Full text Open Access Cite

Quantifying Structural Uncertainty in Paleoclimate Data Assimilation With an Application to the Last Millennium

Journal Article Geophysical Research Letters · November 28, 2020 Paleoclimate reconstruction relies on estimates of spatiotemporal relationships among climate quantities to interpolate between proxy data. This work quantifies how structural uncertainties in those relationships translate to uncertainties in reconstructio ... Full text Open Access Cite

Implications of CMIP6 Projected Drying Trends for 21st Century Amazonian Drought Risk

Journal Article Earth S Future · October 1, 2020 Recent exceptionally hot droughts in Amazonia have highlighted the potential role of global warming in driving changes in rainfall and temperatures in the region. The previous generation of global climate models projected that eastern Amazonia would receiv ... Full text Open Access Cite

Large scale tropical deforestation drives extreme warming

Journal Article Environmental Research Letters · August 1, 2020 Accelerating deforestation rates in Earth's tropical rainforests have dramatic impacts on local public health, agricultural productivity, and global climate change. We used satellite observations to quantify the local temperature changes in deforested patc ... Full text Open Access Cite

Magnitudes and Spatial Patterns of Interdecadal Temperature Variability in CMIP6

Journal Article Geophysical Research Letters · April 16, 2020 Attribution and prediction of global and regional warming requires a better understanding of the magnitude and spatial characteristics of internal global mean surface air temperature (GMST) variability. We examine interdecadal GMST variability in Coupled M ... Full text Open Access Cite

Local Regions Associated With Interdecadal Global Temperature Variability in the Last Millennium Reanalysis and CMIP5 Models

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres · September 1, 2019 Despite the importance of interdecadal climate variability, we have a limited understanding of which geographic regions are associated with global temperature variability at these timescales. The instrumental record tends to be too short to develop sample ... Full text Open Access Cite

Ocean-Atmosphere Trajectories of Extended Drought in Southwestern North America

Journal Article Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres · August 27, 2019 Multiyear droughts are a common occurrence in southwestern North America (SWNA), but it is unclear what causes these persistent dry periods. The ocean-atmosphere conditions coinciding with droughts have traditionally been studied using correlation and comp ... Full text Open Access Cite

The Continuum of Drought in Southwestern North America

Journal Article Journal of Climate · October 2018 Drought has severe consequences for humans and their environment, yet we have a limited understanding of the drivers of drought across the full range of time scales on which it occurs. Here, the atmosphere and ocean conditions that drive this cont ... Full text Cite

The Threat of Multi-Year Drought in Western Amazonia

Journal Article Water Resources Research · September 1, 2018 Recent “once-in-a-century” Amazonian droughts highlight the impacts of drought and climate change on this region's vegetation, carbon storage, water cycling, biodiversity, land use, and economy. The latest climate model simulations suggest this region will ... Full text Open Access Cite

Temperature and Precipitation Variance in CMIP5 Simulations and Paleoclimate Records of the Last Millennium

Journal Article Journal of Climate · November 15, 2017 AbstractAccurate assessments of future climate impacts require realistic simulation of interannual–century-scale temperature and precipitation variability. Here, well-constrained paleoclimate data and the la ... Full text Cite