The thermal dome is built over the United States and Canada this week, which brings triple temperatures to millions of people. Extreme heat occurs when forecasts predict that most of the United States will encounter hot than on average Summer this year.
Extreme heat becomes only more common. In the United States, heat waves now arise three times more often As in the 1960s, and one study published in 2022 in the journal CopernicusIN I found that climate change makes heat domes 150 times more often.
Will the climate change will aggravate heat? Experts say that the answer is loud yes.
“I think this is one of the simplest things to answer,” says Bill Gallus, a professor of meteorology at the University of Iowa. “There are so many difficulties, and we cannot say exactly what the climate will be done, for example, how many hurricanes or tornado we get, but it is likely that we will have more thermal domes and, probably, more hot temperatures in thermal domes.”
What is a heat dome?
The thermal dome occurs when the high -pressure system is delayed, capturing hot air in place.
Thermal domes and thermal waves are found simultaneously, however, when a thermal wave passes, it tends to last only a few days. The heat dome, for comparison, has a tendency to stay anywhere from several days to several weeks. “[With heat waves] You can, at least, look forward to, for a rather short period of time, the weather will change. You become cooler, ”says Gallus. “When you get a heat dome, it can remain in place for a longer period of time.”
Read more: What to find out about thermal domes – and how long they will last
How does climate change affect thermal domes?
As our climate heats up, we will probably more often experience thermal domes. “Thermal domes are ordinary weather phenomena that we have seen for a long time, but we see now, with climate warming, that the number of heat domes is probably slightly increasing, but [also] Their intensity, the heat in itself, is growing, ”says Gordon McBrin, an honorary professor at the Western University.
There are two reasons for this. Periodic gases warm the planet, laying heat in the atmosphere, which contributes to high pressure areas that make up heat domes. Secondly, the Arctic regions heat up faster than the regions closer to the equator. This difference weakens the jet flow that helps to influence the temperature that we feel on the ground – reduce it and lead to a larger number of prolonged, high -pressure systems and high temperatures. “We believe that when the reactive stream is weaker, this video looks more likely to accept, similar to the American slides across the planet,” says Gallus. (A change in the jet flow also affects our winters, creating the soil for severe weather storms and polar vortex.)
Is it possible to do anything to prevent the deterioration of heat domes?
Many regions around the world began to accept heat softening strategies for adaptation to high temperatures are independent of whether they plant trees for the shadow or painting of hot paint houses. But in order to really decide the cause of thermal domes and constantly growing temperatures, experts emphasize that countries should reduce emissions around the world.
“The atmosphere will heat up, and we must begin to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases,” says Macbin.
Nevertheless, if we switched tomorrow and stopped all the emissions, the atmosphere will still take decades to recover, says Gallus. “Even if we suddenly stopped burning fossil fuel and did not add more greenhouse gases, we really warmed the atmosphere, so we will have to pay consequences.”
