Texas is trapped under a “heat dome” that is expected to bring more record highs and strain the power grid. As the heatwave expands through parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and all the way across the Gulf coast, tens of millions are facing excessive heat warnings.
Houston, the largest city in Texas, hit a high of 100F (38C) today, and officials are expecting daily high temperatures in Austin to remain above 100F for the next several days.
Meanwhile, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot) said power use reached record high of 80,828 MW on Tuesday evening, with peak demand expected to rise higher tomorrow, as residents crank up their air conditioning. The agency had warned residents last week to conserve energy if possible, amidst record demand. Ercot anticipates it will have enough resources to meet current demand.
Cori Iadonisi, of Dallas, summed up the weather simply: “It’s just too hot here.”
Iadonisi, 40, said she often urged local friends to visit her native Washington state to beat the heat in the summer.
“You can’t go outside,” Iadonisi said of the hot months in Texas. “You can’t go for a walk.”
A heat dome occurs when stationary high pressure with warm air combines with warmer than usual air in the Gulf of Mexico and heat from the sun nearly directly overhead, said John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatologist and professor at Texas A&M’s College of Atmospheric Sciences.
“By the time we get into the middle of summer, it’s hard to get the hot air aloft,” said Nielsen-Gammon. “If it’s going to happen, this is the time of year it will.”
Nielsen-Gammon said July and August do not have as much sunlight as June because the sun is retreating from the summer solstice, which was on Wednesday.
“One thing that is a little unusual about this heatwave is we had a fairly wet April and May, and usually that extra moisture serves as an air conditioner,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “But the air aloft is so hot that it wasn’t able to prevent the heat wave from occurring and, in fact, added a bit to the humidity.”
The National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) said more than 46 million people from west Texas and south-eastern New Mexico to the western Florida Panhandle were under heat alerts. The NIHHIS is a joint project of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
On Sunday, storms killed three people and left more than 100,000 without electricity in Arkansas and Tennessee and tens of thousands powerless in Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, according to poweroutage.us.
Earlier this month, the most populous county in Oregon filed a $1.5bn lawsuit against more than a dozen large fossil fuel companies to recover costs related to extreme weather events linked to climate change, including a deadly 2021 heat dome.
Multnomah county, home to Portland and known for mild weather, alleges combined carbon pollution the companies emitted was a substantial factor in causing and exacerbating record-breaking temperatures in the Pacific north-west that killed 69 people in that county.
An attorney for Chevron, Theodore J Boutrous Jr, said in a statement the lawsuit makes “novel, baseless claims”.
Extreme heat can be particularly dangerous to vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly and outdoor workers.
Cecilia Sorensen, a physician and associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University medical center, said heat-related conditions are becoming a growing public health concern because of the warming climate.
“There’s huge issues going on in Texas right now around energy insecurity and the compounding climate crises we’re seeing,” Sorensen said. “This is also one of those examples where, if you are wealthy enough to be able to afford an air conditioner, you’re going to be safer, which is a huge climate health equity issue.”
In Texas, the average daily high temperatures have increased by 2.4F – 0.8F a decade – since 1993, according to Noaa, amid concerns over human-caused climate change resulting in rising temperatures.
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