The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials)😉
Main Topic: Hot And Humid Weather To Follow For U.S. In Wake Of Henri
Dear Diary. As I write today’s diary post Henri is making landfall across coastal Rhode Island as a strong tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 65 mph. The system did not ramp up enough over anomalously warm Atlantic waters to make landfall as a hurricane because it encountered too much shear from an upper low located over the mid-Atlantic area steering the system north an just a tad west. About the only two climate change factors we can peg on Henri are its slowing forward speed and high precipitation rates. As global warming continues air masses will tend to hold more moisture, which can get squeezed out as heavy rain or snowfall once precipitation dynamics come into play.
Whether or not Henri is deemed bad enough to warrant a name retirement will not matter to the poor souls affected by this system the next couple of days. Power outages and flooding should cost eastern New York and New York millions of dollars. So, what type of weather will follow in the wake of Henri across the United States?
We are already getting a hint by a developing heat wave across the south-central U.S. where heat advisors are in effect:
The area where advisories are in place can already be described as being in a CAT1 heatwave using my classification system. We may see it grow to a dangerous CAT3 later this week looking at model temperature forecasts:
Once a system becomes a CAT3 it gets a Greek letter name in my system for 2021. The next on the alphabetical list would be Theta. It’s late August, so heatwaves are quite common this time of the year, but carbon pollution is enhancing these, making them worse than they would otherwise be had the Industrial Revolution not taken place.
Certainly the heat dome responsible for this extra warmth will be stronger than average for late August by mid week looking at the following Pivotal Weather chart:
For most of the United States above average temperatures will persist through the remainder of August:
Of course, where there are weaknesses in the ridge, or around the system where cool pockets of air are interacting with trapped moisture, there will be heavy rainfall and occasional violent thunderstorms. This heatwave will complete the three months that are meteorological summer from June through August. Exactly where Summer 2021 stacks up for the U.S. compared with all others since 1895 remains to be seen, but I would bet that it will rank in the top five once the National Center For Environmental Information crunches numbers. Certainly this extra heat at the end of meteorological summer will push that final ranking higher.
Given how hot and unstable the atmosphere will be going into September, I fear that there will be a lot of strong organized tropical activity to affect coastal areas before true cool fall weather settles in over the lower 48 states. This summer has had so many dreadful weather events that we will see the phenomenon of people dreading warm seasons to come and wishing that increasingly mild winters will last longer. Welcome to the uncomfortable part of the Anthropocene.
Here is a lot more on Henri, which I will be updating as Sunday progresses. The newest and most important notes will appear at the top of this list:
Here is more climate and weather news from Sunday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
Now here are some of today’s articles and notes on the horrid COVID-19 pandemic:
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Guy Walton “The Climate Guy”