We have a strong, but not unprecedented, heat wave gripping the central USA. NOAA made this video animation to show the breadth of it, which I converted to YouTube so everyone could view it:
NOAA’s description of this video:
A shroud of high pressure has taken a foot-hold over the U.S. from the Plains to the Northeast, and with it has brought temperatures well into the 90’s and 100’s for half of the country. This animation shows the predicted daily high temperatures from NOAA’s high resolution North American Model (NAM) from July 13-21, 2011.
NOAA writes: Dangerous heat grips Central U.S. Forecast to also affect East
Unhealthy levels of heat and humidity are encompassing much of central U.S. from the Southern Plains through the upper Midwest and this sultry heat will move east this week into the mid-Atlantic and Southeast, according to NOAA’s National Weather Service.
Temperatures in the 90s to near 100 degrees will feel as hot as 115 degrees or higher when factoring in the high humidity. Record high temperatures are likely to be set in some locations — adding to the more than 1000 records that have been set or tied so far this month.
“This heat is dangerous on many levels,” said Jack Hayes, director of the National Weather Service. “Temperatures and humidity levels are high, the heat will be prolonged, and very warm temperatures overnight won’t provide any respite. All of these factors make this an unhealthy situation, especially those in the upper Midwest who are not accustom to such heat.”
No quibbles there, a large blocking high like we saw last year in Russia is stubbornly fixated over the central USA. The media however, is on another story.
Don Penim writes in tips and notes:
Hot topic. Here we go again.
The Media is loving this heat wave. According to this CNN report :
“The National Weather Service notes that typically extreme heat is the biggest weather-related killer in the United States, taking about 115 lives each year.”
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/18/heat.wave/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
Not according to the data, see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/18/the-deadliest-us-natural-hazard-extreme-cold/
Also this:
In an article entitled, “The impact of global warming on health and mortality,” published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2004, W.R. Keatinge and G.C. Donaldson of Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of London note:
“Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold.”
“From 1979 to 1997, extreme cold killed roughly twice as many Americans as heat waves, according to Indur Goklany of the U.S. Department of the Interior,” Singer and Avery write. “Cold spells, in other words, are twice as dangerous to our health as hot weather.”
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Does_Hot_weather_or_cold_weather_cause_more_deaths#ixzz1SWXgP7qR
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Here’s Goklany’s report Deaths and Death Rates from Extreme Weather Events: 1900-2008 (PDF). This table pretty well sums it up:
UPDATE: some historical perspective
Dallas-Fort Worth heat wave of 1980 still seared into memories
11:50 PM CDT on Friday, August 6, 2010
By DAVID FLICK / The Dallas Morning News
Friday marked the seventh day in a row that temperatures in the Dallas area reached at least 100 degrees, but it was not what some people would call hot.
Those people – that is, people who remember Dallas during the summer of 1980 – can tell you about hot.
It was 30 years ago this week that a 42-day string of 100 degree days – the longest heat wave by far in the region’s history – was broken. For one day. More triple digits followed, and when autumn mercifully arrived, temperatures had hit the century mark 69 times.
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Could someone send a bit of this heat to Central England please, it’s about 14c here at the moment. Is there a climate control quango somewhere that can promise bliss weather in the U.K. for a mere few £trillion in taxes.
Bad mistake(A big sorry) in my post saying Climate Control,please delete before Government get Ideas.
Monday and Tuesday, every time I walked outside from the air conditioned lab, my glasses steamed up to the point I had to take them off. Awesomely high dew point in Minnesota
“The Twin Cities tied its all time highest dewpoint of 81 degrees Sunday night at 9 p.m. and then trumped it Tuesday at 3 p.m. when the dewpoint hit a tropical 82 degrees. The previous record prior to this week for the Twin Cities was in July of 1999. Both of those dew points occurred after rain had moved through allowing even more moisture to pool in the atmosphere.”
This weather sucks but id rather have heat than cold.
Global day-time highs on Land from July 4 to 11. (the high-resolution satellite temperature maps on land are always a little behind).
Nothing to write home about. Probably more cold areas than warm areas.
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/1786/july4to112011.png
Since July 11, the warm area in the centre of North America would have expanded but the centre of non-tropical continents often have persistent warm or cold weather systems. This is how our climate operates and it has probably always done so.
I did 24 miles by mountain bike on Independence day and seemed to have less strength during the inclines at 105 degrees. I did need more hydration. I must be getting soft because I work in air conditioned office.
Well, it’s notso hotso in the People’s Republic of Eugene, in the southern Willamette Valley, either. This da*n high pressure ridge in the Midwest gave us an inch of rain over the weekend, and it’s not supposed to rain here “after July 5,” as we like to brag.
Our raspberries and lettuce are doing just fine, but it’s definitely gonna be a Year of the Green Tomato unless something turns around soon. Daytime temps in the 70s and cool nights. I s’pose it beats my native state of Texas (which I dearly love) on the comfort factor, however.
Ok – I need some help with how temperatures are recorded. I am watching the weather news and they are saying it was 36 degrees C in Ontario today but adjusted for humidity it was equivalent to 40 degrees C and therefore nearly a record for this day (the record was in 1935 in Yellowgrass Saskatchewan – south of Regina – at 45 degrees C where it was 23 today). But my question is: Are all temperatures adjusted for humidity? – I thought that was a recent development. So are we comparing apples an oranges or are media types just finding ways to make the temperatures appear higher? I can remember recording and adjusting for such things in various calculations in engineering work, but I don’t recall humidity having any affect on the thermal expansion of steel and concrete, only wood strength. From what I have read about the humididex and wind chill, they are irrelevant to the measured temperature but the media is playing it up big time. That so called near record local temperature was NOT a record at all without the humididex and below the 1935 record by 9 degrees …. yet the media were hyping it up like it was really hot. Should send them to Dubai for a few months.
Repeated for truth!
How quickly ‘heat dome’ replaced ‘high pressure dome’ in the popular vernacular!
The latter sounds natural while the former rings well….alarmist.
I immediately questioned the NWS claim that heat was the number one weather-related killer in the US. As an NWS employee, I thought I’d work my way up the chain to get an answer as to how the NWS can make that claim. I got an answer fairly quickly. This claim is based on deaths reported in the NWS Storm Data reports. So if a death isn’t reported to a local NWS office, it doesn’t get into Storm Data. Although I don’t agree with their methodology and believe it is inaccurate, I see how they can make that claim.
Generally, heat is not a significant killer, as long as sufficient rain accompanies it. Extended heat without rain has caused crop failures, which in turn has caused local famine, hence significant death in the past.
Extended cold shortening/eliminating sufficient growing season has also caused crop failures and famine death. However cold is accompanied by virulent disease for both Man, critter and crop. This is when cold becomes a killer like NO other.
Cold and ice is death personified.
Thankfully, our energy grid has not failed – so far (no thanks to wind turbines) GK
Huth wrote:
Millions of people live in the kind of heat this post is talking about ALL THE TIME!
Correct. For the last 30 days, we’ve had a heat index above 40 degrees, here in Shanghai. Go just 150km south, to Ningbo, and the heat index has been above 44 degrees for the last month. And that’s pretty normal for this part of the world – we usually spend from mid-June until mid-September with heat-index values above 37, every single day.
It’s even worse in SE Asia – go to Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur in February when they have a “cold snap” of 70 degrees F (21 deg C). You’ll see Thai and Malay nationals bundled up in sweaters and coats and boots because it’s cold!