NIEHS Launches Climate and Health Data Website

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) launched a new website of data resources, tools and training materials that can aid researchers in studying the consequences of climate change on the health of communities nationwide. The site, Climate and Health Outcomes Research Data Systems (CHORDS), includes a catalog of environmental and health outcomes data from various government and nongovernmental agencies.

“This project is fundamentally a way for this institute and others to come together to empower the use of environmental determinants of health,” said Dr. Aubrey Miller, deputy director of scientific coordination at NIEHS. “We’re seeing climate change and health disasters around the country increasing in frequency and severity, so the need is greater than ever.”

The resource is one of several planned as part of a three-year project by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund. NIEHS competed with other agencies for the funding to build up data systems that will improve patient or population health. The website, its publicly available datasets and the CHORDS project are part of the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative (CCHI).

What’s available

The CHORDS technical expert panel met in person for the first time at NIEHS in July.

Photo:  Steve McCaw/NIEHS

The website provides data resources; tutorials and for downloading, integrating and visualizing health and environmental data; a listing of publications of note on wildfire and health research; and links to existing resources, such as the NIEHS climate change and health glossary and literature portal.

The catalog includes a listing of dozens of data resources provided by different federal and state environmental and health sources. Users can sort the listing based on environmental and health measures of interest — such as specific air pollutants or chemicals — from data providers including NASA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with many more to come.

In addition, users can search the catalog by keyword, such as “PM2.5,” which is a measure of air pollution, and the population studied. They can then drill down into the information available and narrow their results to specific domains, such as environmental justice, climate change or electronic health records.

What’s next

The CHORDS team will add additional resources to its catalog and expand the content in the training toolkit. The team also is developing new software and climate analysis tools. The new software tools will also be used to generate standardized environmental datasets that health researchers can readily add to their own research projects.

“We’d like to make sure we’re doing the best we can, representing other resources, getting input on how to improve, and asking what we might be missing,” said Dr. Charles Schmitt, director of the NIEHS Office of Data Science. “We’d like to collaborate with people on additional resources and point people to where they can go to get additional information.”

To learn more about CHORDS, visit:
go.nih.gov/jQqLJI1.

For more on the CCHI, see:
https://climateandhealth.nih.gov.