Fig 1.
Spatial distribution of the average annual number of severe discomfort days across 34 meteorological stations in Bangladesh.
The map was generated by the authors using QGIS version 3.30. Administrative boundary data were sourced from the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), provided by OCHA Bangladesh (available at: https://data.humdata.org/dataset/cod-ab-bgd). This is an original figure created for illustrative purposes; it contains no proprietary basemap layers and is compliant with CC BY 4.0 licensing.
Table 1.
Discomfort Index (DI) classification and associated thermal stress levels [13,14].
Fig 2.
Workflow of hybrid forecasting models for Discomfort Index (DI) prediction.
Fig 3.
Daily discomfort index in Rajshahi with seasonal adjustment (maroon) and trend components (gray) from January 1985 to December 2024.
Fig 4.
Boxplot shows the distribution of yearly thermal discomfort variation in Rajshahi from January 1985 to December 2024.
Fig 5.
Boxplot shows the distribution of monthly thermal discomfort variation in Rajshahi from January 1985 to December 2024.
Fig 6.
Monthly proportion of population discomfort levels in Rajshahi based on daily Discomfort Index from January 1985 to December 2024, categorized by defined thermal stress thresholds.
Fig 7.
Monthly average Discomfort Index (DI) overlaid on comfort zones in Rajshahi from January 1985 to December 2024, illustrating typical thermal stress levels experienced in each month.
Table 2.
Forecasting performance of single models and the top five hybrid models for daily Discomfort Index (DI) without seasonal adjustment in Rajshahi (1985–2024).
Table 3.
Forecasting performance of seasonal-adjusted single models and the top five seasonal-adjusted hybrid models for daily Discomfort Index (DI) in Rajshahi (1985–2024).
Fig 8.
Observed (1985–2024) and forecasted (2025–2027) daily Discomfort Index (DI) in Rajshahi using the STL-TBATS-LSTM model, overlaid with categorized thermal stress levels in (a) and the forecasted DI (2025–2027) with 80% and 95% confidence intervals to highlight the uncertainty ranges with seasonal and extreme discomfort patterns in (b).
Fig 9.
Donut chart illustrates percentage distribution of forecasted daily Discomfort Index (DI) categories in Rajshahi from January 2025 to December 2027.