Spatial Extremes at Scale: A Case Study of Surface Skin Temperature and Heat Risk in the United States

Abstract: Understanding and mapping extreme heat is critical for risk management and public health planning, particularly in regions with complex terrain and heterogeneous climate. We present a case study of extreme heat in the Four Corners region of the United States, using high-resolution surface skin temperature data from the North American Land Data Assimilation System to characterize spatially heterogeneous and seasonally varying extremes across complex terrain, and to assess their implications for heat-related public health risks. Spatial extremes exhibit complex dependencies across geographic regions, which require sophisticated statistical models to capture. While recent advances in spatial extreme value modeling provide flexible representations of joint tail dependencies, statistical inference remains computationally demanding, especially for datasets with a large number of locations. To address this, we propose a random scale mixture process that facilitates Bayesian inference of spatial extremes, and develop scalable inference strategies that leverage advances in spatial modeling and amortized learning. We evaluate the proposed inference methods through large-scale simulation studies, representing the first such extensive study in spatial extremes, and a high-resolution surface skin temperature application in the Four Corners region. Surface skin temperature is particularly useful as a predictor for air temperature, for studying heatwaves and related environmental phenomena, and to calculate heat indices reflecting downstream health risks at any location. Our findings provide insights into efficient, data-driven approaches for modeling spatial extremes, and serve as guidelines for practitioners in the fields of climate science, environmental risk assessment, and beyond.