Unprecedented, Incredible, Uneasy: Feeling the Heat Wave in Seattle | Justin Show

The best summer city in the country has just reached 42.2 ° C.

Until recently I lived in the Seattle area, the so-called old millennial generation. Seattle When it comes to comfort, the summer was really unsurpassed. High in the 70s? check. Bluebird skies after morning clouds? check. Would a nice sea breeze blow in the evening to soften the warmth of the day? check.

And 100 degrees? Virtually unheard of. During the summer after I finished my third year of 1994, Seattle temperatures temporarily hit the mark of the century on a hot July afternoon. Past. Reply? Records management for the past 90 years only existed once in the summer of 1941. So Seattle shrugged and moved on. And for the next 15 years, our summer weather generally stayed the same. A cool morning under cloud cover and a sunny afternoon under room temperature skies.

Then came the summer of 2009. Mercury floated for two days towards the end of July in the mid-1990s, fulfilling its promise after cursing Seattle residents with what could be triple-digit heat, and rising to 103 on the third day. As a city, we were stunned. 103 degrees? How should our proudly air-conditioned city sleep? How can you cool off at night without the sea air opening the windows?

Fortunately, temperatures have dropped every day since then, with peaks below 21 ° C in the first week of August. Fortunately, we told each other that we had only survived a one-time heat wave. You will never see anything like this again. This is. .. ..was Seattle.

And I came in June 2021. As of this writing, sunset is an hour ahead and it’s still 100F (38C). And yesterday and the day before yesterday it was over 100. And so Seattle set a three-day record that lasted 125 years, a three-day 100-degree day. It’s unprecedented. Unbelievable. And that’s fear.

The neighborhood street, which is usually filled with children laughing and playing, is a ghost town. The park is deserted. The trail head is empty. Breathtaking heat blankets the air across the city, littered with the quiet drums of overworked fans and the occasional squeaky air conditioner (44% of Seattle residents who own them). If you are inside). When you go outside, you feel like you are in the sauna. A 10-minute walk feels like a 20-minute run. And for Pete, this is the third day of the 100s. Did Seattle Become Sacramento Overnight?

The heat waves that hit our part of the country have gone from serious to disease. It’s not a good sign when a city like Seattle, surrounded by the cold waters of Puget Sound, burns in triple digits for three days in a row. It is embarrassing when the city, surrounded by evergreens and lakes, is as hot as the desert in the southwest. You should be concerned. If Seattle, America’s comfortable summer capital, could be hotter than Atlanta, Washington, and New York (Seattle’s new high of 108 ° F or 42 ° C has so far been observed in each of these cities. What does this mean for the rest of the world? The 110s are coming soon raid the east coast, will the 120s be commonplace in Los Angeles?

Of course, the obvious answer is that we really don’t know. Yes, we have state-of-the-art weather models and great algorithms that can spit out different temperature forecasts for cities around the world as the earth continues to warm. Unfortunately, there is no doubt that many of them are terribly realistic. .. But the same models didn’t teach us to hide in the northwest corner of the country to withstand the unprecedented triple-digit heat of June. They didn’t expect Seattle to flirt at 110 degrees. It goes without saying that by the end of Independence Day, the top 100 will be flirting even in places where warm weather won’t show up.

RIP, Seattle Summer. It was fun while it lasted.

Unprecedented, unbelievable, restless: Feel the heat wave in Seattle | Justin show

Source link Unprecedented, unbelievable, restless: Feel the heat wave in Seattle | Justin show