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Abstract. The accessibility of emergency medical services (EMSs) is not only determined by the distribution of emergency medical facilities but is also very vulnerable to weather conditions. Inclement weather could affect the efficiency of the city's traffic network and further affect the response time of EMSs, which could therefore be an essential impact factor on the safety of human lives. This study proposes an EMS-accessibility quantification method based on selected indicators and explores the influence of inclement weather on EMS accessibility and identifies the hot spots that have difficulty accessing timely EMSs. A case study was implemented in Beijing, which is a typical megacity in China, based on the ground-truth traffic data of the whole city in 2019. The results show that inclement weather has a general negative impact on EMS accessibility. The 15-min EMS coverage rate of the area could have a maximum reduction of 13 % at the citywide scale and could reach over 40 % in some suburban townships. Although on the whole, the urban area would have more traffic speed reduction, towns with lower baseline EMS accessibility is more vulnerable to inclement weather, furthermore, the proportion of elderly population in these towns is also higher than the average level of the whole city. Under the worst scenario in 2019, 12.6 % of population (about 3.5 million) could not get EMS within 15 minutes, compared to 7.5 % with the normal condition. This study could provide a scientific reference for city planning departments to optimize traffic under inclement weather and the site selection of emergency medical facilities.
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