Heat wave and coronavirus: double risk spikes for U.S.
For much of the United States, the last several days have been brutal: Record temperatures recorded around the country, and coronavirus case numbers are on the rise as well, complicating efforts to protect people at risk.
The weekend set temperature records in the South and Southwest, which continued into this week. On Monday, the National Weather Service warned that “The relentless heat and humidity across the south-central U.S. will continue to make weather headlines going through the middle of the week.” On Wednesday, the Weather Service said that the most punishing heat would begin to abate across the South, but, like a hot bubble under the nation’s wallpaper, “will be on the increase for the eastern U.S. and for the northern High Plains.”
Greg Carbin, chief of the forecast operations branch at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, said, “It’s July — you kind of expect this, to some extent. But the magnitude of it is a little severe.”
The combination of heat and humidity sent heat indexes in places like central Oklahoma above 115 degrees, and “that is just really dangerous to spend any time outdoors in, unless you’re standing under a cool waterfall somewhere,” Carbin said, who also noted that the heat index in New Orleans on Monday was 120 degrees. The tremendous heat and moisture can also set the stage for severe weather. “When you have that much energy available for those storms, it can be very dangerous,” he said.
The heat wave is consistent with what scientists say to expect from climate change, said J. Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist at the University of Georgia and a former president of the American Meteorological Society. He took part in a 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences that found that, of the weather phenomena affected by climate change, heat waves show the strongest signal of the warming planet.
On Monday, the National Weather Service in San Antonio announced the temperature reached 106 degrees, tying the July temperature record. Monitors at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport hit a blazing 114, matching a record hit previously in 2005, 2003, 1989 and 1939.
In Houston, Matt Lanza, a meteorologist for Space City Weather, reported the temperature at Bush Intercontinental Airport reached 100 degrees, with a heat index of 111. How does that feel? Such temperatures overwhelm the everyday vocabulary; in an exchange of Twitter messages, he called the combination of heat and humidity “terribad.”
For many cities, the heat is part of a double whammy as they try to deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic. Matthew Lara, a spokesman for the city of Austin Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said that Monday’s high of 108 degrees — a record for that day by 3 degrees — underplayed the compounding effects of a city’s heat islands, where buildings and paved surfaces can amplify heat and temperatures can be much higher.
Weather like this disproportionally affects the vulnerable: people without the means to buy an air conditioner or crank it up to full blast. Many cities have typically had cooling centers, where people can get out of the heat. The coronavirus has introduced complications, Lara said, because the city’s cooling centers now require visitors to maintain social distancing and to wear masks. “You don’t want to cram 30 people into a room and call it a cooling center,” he said.
Lara, the Austin official, said that relief, at least for his city, was on the way, for now. “We’re supposed to get a nice, breezy cold front to cool us down to the high 90s by the end of the week,” he said, “Which is more normal for this time of year.”