Environmental group warns state’s record heat poses grave health risks
Orlando is feeling the burn of its third hottest year, according to National Weather Service records since the late 1800s.
That’s as a major environmental group warned Tuesday that really hot days are occurring more often in Florida and the nation.
The Natural Resources Defense Council released a study and map of the nation showing where extremely hot days — equaling the hottest 10 percent of summer days from past decades — on are on the rise. Florida is among states with the biggest uptick.
“The summers of the past no longer speak to the summers of the present,” said Kim Knowlton, deputy director of NRDC’s Science Center.
The group examined readings from thousands of local weather stations from 1961 through 1990 to determine temperatures from
the hottest 10 percent of summer days.
What the group then learned was that those temperatures occurred more frequently on average in the past decade — several days more often annually in Florida’s case — than during the past three decades.
The group paired its findings with recommendations that the nation prepares for more dangerously hot days and pursues strategies to reduce pollution that traps heat in the atmosphere.
Soaring temperatures, according to the group and experts it recruited, can pose grave health risks for children, the elderly, people with heart, lung and other illnesses and those engaged in outdoor sports.
“The prevalence of extreme summer temperatures is expected to increase,” Knowlton said. “
Among preparedness measures are promoting green space and tree cover in urban areas and better protecting those vulnerable to hot weather, according to the group.
As the state’s and the planet’s temperatures have been on the rise, Orlando in the past decade has notched five of its Top 10 hottest years — a streak that includes some ties.
For Orlando, 2015 was the hottest year on record since 1892, said Derrick Weitlich, climate program leader at the National Weather Service in Melbourne.
Last year was the fourth-warmest for Orlando and this year is on track to finish as thirdwarmest.
There is more to Central Florida’s streak of warm years than extremely high temperatures, Weitlich said.
In 2015, for example, there were many more record warm nights than there were record-hot daytime temperatures.
“There were 13 record highs tied or set that year,” Weitlich said. “But when you look at the [nighttime] low temperatures, there were 24 that tied or set the warmest temperature.”
Juanita Constible, a projects director at NRDC’s climate program, said “that pattern is very similar to what we are seeing across the rest of the country.”
“We are seeing the nighttime lows getting warmer faster than daytime highs,” Constible said. “And those warmer nighttime lows are in themselves a serious health threat especially in a humid state like Florida.”
She pointed to the frustrations many Floridians felt during the widespread power and air-condition outages following Hurricane Irma last month.
“If it doesn’t cool off at night, than people don’t get relief,” Constible said.