Harnessing CARC Power to Predict Global Dengue Outbreaks Amid El Niño Swings

by Mariah Rosales

A groundbreaking 2024 study published in Environmental Research sheds new light on how El Niño events amplify the global risk of dengue fever outbreaks — and it’s research that would not have been possible without the computing power of the University of New Mexico’s Center for Advanced Research Computing.

In the study, researchers developed a mechanistic model to examine how climate variability influences the basic reproduction number (R₀) of dengue — a metric that measures how easily the virus can spread from person to person. Using more than 70 years of temperature and precipitation data, the team simulated global dengue transmission risk from 1950 to 2020, uncovering clear patterns that link El Niño events to periods of heightened outbreak potential.

“Without CARC’s high-performance computing capabilities, running our climate–disease model at this global scale simply wouldn’t have been feasible,” said lead author Dr. Mokhtar Sina of UNM’s Department of Mathematics & Statistics. “The resources we accessed through CARC allowed us to process massive climate datasets and produce forecasts that could one day help public health officials get ahead of outbreaks.”

The results revealed specific regions and months where El Niño-driven climate conditions significantly increased the likelihood of dengue transmission. These insights could help governments and health agencies fine-tune mosquito control efforts, allocate resources more effectively, and develop targeted early warning systems.

“By integrating decades of climate cycles with disease dynamics, we’re now better equipped to anticipate outbreak ‘hot months’ tied to El Niño peaks,” added co-author Dana Pittman Ratterree, a collaborator from Texas A&M University. “That kind of foresight is critical when every week counts in disease prevention.”

According to the World Health Organization, dengue cases have surged worldwide in recent years, with 2024 seeing over seven million cases reported by April — more than triple the count from the same period in 2023. The study’s global, long-term approach offers a valuable tool for understanding and mitigating one of the fastest-growing mosquito-borne threats in the world.

CARC is proud to have played a role in making this research possible by providing the high-performance computing clusters, large-scale storage, and technical expertise needed to manage and analyze terabytes of climate and epidemiological data.