BHRIGU
BHRIGU National Heat+ Insights Explorer
Building heat resilience in India's growing urbanscapesExplore open-access climate datasets, urban heat trends, historical heat data, national heat data, and multi-hazard mapping for data-driven heat resilience.
A National Heat+ Insights Explorer (NHIE)
India's urbanscapes are increasingly vulnerable to heat stress, driven by rapid urbanisation, changing land-use patterns, and evolving climatic conditions. Understanding these patterns requires looking beyond air temperature alone, considering both surface conditions and human thermal exposure, while accounting for atmospheric, land surface, and environmental factors that shape heat stress across diverse urban environments. It also requires understanding where heat overlaps with other climate hazards and how these hazards intersect with the places and populations exposed to them.
Building Heat Resilience in India's Growing Urbanscapes–National Heat+ Insights Explorer (BHRIGU–NHIE) is an interactive web-based platform that brings together nationally consistent heat assessment datasets covering the period 2002–2025, along with information on other climate hazards and supporting thematic datasets, to enable the exploration and understanding of heat patterns across India. The platform integrates multiple heat indices that represent surface thermal behaviour, human thermal discomfort, and overall heat hazard. In addition to these heat indices, the portal offers information on other climate hazards, including floods, drought, and extreme rainfall, enabling users to explore where different hazards occur together and understand their spatial combinations. It also includes demographic, infrastructure, land-use, and urban thematic datasets to provide context for understanding exposure in different places. The heat datasets are presented at a 1 km × 1 km spatial resolution, enabling detailed analysis across more than 5,000 functional urban areas in India, ranging from dense urban centres to peri-urban and transitional zones.
Designed for governments, researchers, planners, practitioners, decision-makers, and other stakeholders, BHRIGU–NHIE provides a common evidence base for understanding heat patterns, identifying heat-vulnerable areas, and exploring the spatial overlap of different climate hazards. This enables evidence-based planning and decision-making to inform policy development and climate adaptation across local, regional, and national scales.
Read heat exposure signals across growing urban systems.
Connect heat and flood risk layers for planning.
What experts are saying about BHRIGU
These endorsements reflect the platform's value for policy, planning, and local-level resilience work across India.
A timely initiative with strong potential for utilization. The platform can support policy applications at the national and state levels while serving as a valuable resource for training and upskilling urban local body officials and civil society organisations. With continued support from governments, foundations, and partners, its value and impact is likely to grow with time.
This platform's potential for operational planning and decision support is significant.
BHRIGU–NHIE is a valuable initiative for strengthening heat resilience in India. By bringing together heat-related information with urban and demographic data, alongside other hazard layers such as floods, it can support informed planning, targeted interventions and stronger disaster preparedness.