Dengue Climate Variability in Rio de Janeiro City with Cross-Wavelet Transform

Abstract

Dengue is one of the most prominent tropical epidemic diseases present in the Rio de Janeiro city and Southeast part of Brazil, due to the widespread conditions of occurrence of the dengue vector, the mosquito Aedesaegypti, such as high-temperature days interlaced with afternoon or nocturnal rainstorms in summer. This work has the objective of investigating the relationships between variabilities of the El Niño-South Oscillation (ENSO) and greater epidemics of dengue in Rio de Janeiro city. To accomplish this goal, the analysis and signal decomposition by cross-wavelet transform (WT) was applied to obtain the cross variability associated with variations of power and phase of both signals by characteristic periods and along with the time series. Data considered in the analysis are (the decimal logarithm of normalized value) of the monthly available notifications of dengue worsening, provided by the public health system of Brazil, and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) Niño 3.4 data, provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in the period 2000-2017. A maximum cross-wavelet power close to 0.45 was obtained for the representative period of 1 year and also to periods between 3 and 4 years, associated with the positive phase of the SOI index (i.e., La Niña) or with a transition to the positive phase. The evolution of the combined variability of SOI and dengue can be expressed by progressive differences in phase along the time, eventually resulting in yielding phases (i.e., La Niña-Dengue epidemic).