Friday, July 18, 2008

If you can't stand the heat...

Unfortunately, if you can't stand the heat, there's little relief anywhere close by, or even far away! Even Philadelphia is under an Excessive Heat Warning today! Highs above 90 will be found everywhere in the U.S. except in the Rockies, Northern Plains, and Pac Northwest - with 100+ temps in the Desert Southwest (which isn't unusual by the way). See the map below for today's national high temps from Weather Underground.

Also starting to factor against us is increasing humidity, which unlike earlier this week, will mean warmer morning lows, not as much evening cooling, and heat indices that will be climbing near or over 100 for the next several days. It appears that the heat will stay with us through early next week, with only slight chances of rain appearing around mid-week that could help hold the temps down a few degrees. Of course the thing most of us could use the most right now is rain, and that is also several days away, at least...

2 comments:

sudo said...

I heard that the requirements for calling a code orange or red have been lowered so maybe the air isn't really as bad as it seems,eh? Still.. I'm not a "fun in the Sun" person so I'll be the Great Indoorsman for a while. Thank heavens for air conditioning because we didn't have it when I was a child. We were all miserable but lived with it just like everybody else.

Meteorologist Erik Proseus said...

This is very true - see Commercial Appeal article here (http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/apr/17/clean-air-standards-tightened/). Health Dept Meteorologist Michael Goldstein indicates with the new standards there would have been 33 (instead of 5) time when standards were exceeded last year. We could see much more of this yet this summer.