Associate Professor Meredith Franklin and her colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory published an article in AGU’s GeoHealth entitled “Spatial Variation in Humidity and the Onset of Seasonal Influenza Across the Contiguous United States”. Humidity has been shown in laboratory experiments to be a potentially important component of influenza transmission. To investigate this further, this study used historical estimates of influenza case numbers as well as satellite-observed humidity to determine the humidity values that triggered the onset of seasonal influenza across the U.S. This work helps to improve our understanding of how humidity impacts influenza transmission and how we use humidity in models that aim to predict seasonal outbreaks.
Spatial Variation in Humidity and the Onset of Seasonal Influenza Across the Contiguous United States