The Fourth of July weekend in America will be marred by a dangerous heat dome in many areas, with forecasters warning of 100 degree-plus temperatures and punishing humidity.
Some 250 million people will face potentially life-threatening heat, with seniors and children particularly at risk, across the central and eastern regions until July 6.
But while American summers can be sizzling hot in many places, a heat dome is a different beast, weather experts, AccuWeather, explained in an email to The Independent.
That’s because the heat-trapping high pressure systems sit over an area for a week or longer while heat waves only last for a few days, Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter said in a statement.
“Heat domes can prevent clouds from forming, resulting in abundant sunshine that boosts temperatures, potentially toward record levels,” he said.
These events have become more intense and more frequent over the last decade due to human-caused climate change, which researchers say is making the conditions needed to form heat domes 150 times more likely.
“There is growing research that points toward increased persistence of blocking patterns associated with heat domes in a warming atmosphere, which allows a hot pattern to linger for longer periods,” said Porter.
More intense heat domes could mean additional deaths, more problems for aging infrastructure and more severe drought conditions that fuel destructive wildfires.
Heat is already the U.S.’s number one weather-related killer, leading to roughly 2,000 deaths each year, federal data shows.
An oppressive heat dome led to over 1,300 deaths in Europe this month, 1,000 of which were in France alone.
And it’s not just humans that are threatened. A heat dome in 2021 cooked over one billion marine species along Canada’s Pacific coast, biologists previously said.
The domes also help create tinderbox landscapes that makes large and devastating wildfires more possible, drying out the vegetation that serves as kindling and worsening the region’s drought. A heat dome also puts more pressure on available water resources.
The long-lasting nature of heat domes also pose risks for the electricity grid, which can result in power outages that make it harder for people to withstand the heat by running fans and air conditioning units.
Heat domes are expected to worsen in the future as the planet’s atmosphere continues to heat up from the burning of fossil fuels. This year, experts say a developing “godzilla” El Niño climate pattern is intensifying hazardous heat patterns in the U.S. and abroad.
“Supercharged Heat Domes are appearing all around the Planet!” Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV, wrote in a social media post.
“Why? It’s a developing super El Niño combined with a much warmer Earth, spiking natural cycles with extra heat injected into the system and pattern changes augmenting the jet stream,” he said.
