Coming This Summer: Record-Breaking Heat and Plenty of Hurricanes
AccuWeather’s summer forecast isn’t the kind you get for your local weather, so they can’t tell you if it will be raining in your town on the Fourth of July. Instead, this seasonal forecast looks at weather trends in March and April, as well as larger phenomena like La Niña and El Niño, the two bands of warm and cold water in the Pacific Ocean that influence the atmosphere above the western U.S. AccuWeather compares all that to how those spring and summer months looked in previous years to get an idea of what might unfold this time around.
AccuWeather says that temperatures could run higher than average across the vast majority of the country this summer. Its forecast also warns of warmer nights, especially in the eastern U.S. These make heat waves all the more unbearable as the human body can’t get the respite of a cool night to bring down the physiological stress.
The eastern U.S. could also suffer through heat waves punctuated by thunderstorms that load the atmosphere with humidity. Those conditions make the human body less efficient at sweating, raising the risk of heat-related illnesses and deaths. Heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other natural disaster, in part because it can aggravate existing conditions like heart disease and asthma.
Out West, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon could see temperatures 3 degrees Fahrenheit (or more) higher than average. “The daytime highs are a bigger issue, [records] that could be challenged or broken in parts of the Northern Rockies and in the Northwest coming up this summer,” said Paul Pastelok, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.
High temperatures are going to increase wildfire risk, Pastelok added, because a dry, heat-baked landscape is a flammable landscape. Right now almost 40 percent of the U.S. is under drought conditions, double the area of last year. Some parts of the American West actually had a fairly wet winter, but that can also cause problems because strong-growing plants and trees can turn into fuel in the extra-hot summer heat. And as the season wears on, the landscape gets drier, so it’s more liable to burn catastrophically.
Day after day of relentless heat, especially if it’s humid out too, forces people to run the AC more to stay healthy. For the rich, that’s no problem. But lower-income folks suffer a high “energy burden,” meaning a $200 monthly utility bill is a much larger proportion of their income. Americans are also wrestling with an escalating cost-of-living crisis as rent and inflation march higher. With 1 in 6 American households now behind on their utility bills, according to the Initiative for Energy Justice, and 3 million of them having their power shut off each year, the danger is losing power during a heat wave this summer.
City dwellers face added risk here because of the urban heat island effect, the way sidewalks, parking lots, and buildings trap heat and make cities much hotter than surrounding rural areas. Lower-income neighborhoods get 15 to 20 degrees hotter than richer neighborhoods because they have fewer trees, which provide shade and cooling, according to Vivek Shandas, a climate adaptation scientist at Portland State University. “Those neighborhoods and the residents living in them just bear the brunt of that heat wave a lot more acutely than someone living in a more highly invested neighborhood, where tree canopy is lush.”
It will take a whole lot longer to fix the systemic issues that drive heat disparities in cities. But in the meantime, access to air-conditioning will be increasingly crucial as the planet warms. “Having financial assistance for low-income households to make sure that they can keep their electricity and their cooling on during the sweltering summer is more crucial than ever,” Coffey said.
Matt Simon is a Senior Staff Writer at Grist. This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.
