Historic Heat Dome settles over Eastern US, reflecting steamy condition of the Gulf of Mexico, as the heart of Hurricane Season beckons.
John Scheve via Christina Wimpissinger on Facebook:
This is likely to be the strongest heatwave of this intensity ever recorded in the U.S.
The cause is a gigantic heat dome in the atmosphere with an intensity of four standard deviations from the average (which is practically never expected) and extremely high humidity due to sea surface temperatures of about 32 °C (90 °F) in the northern Gulf of Mexico and slightly less than the US east coast.
For the first half of the next week, heat indexes of 43 to 49 °C (110 to 120 °F) are forecast for parts of 16 states: the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky.
This is much worse than in Death Valley. For more vulnerable people or elderly people without access to cooling, this may not be surviveable. If you know such people, reach out now.
Meteorologist John Morales for Environmental Defense Fund:
I think American lives are more at risk in 2025 than they were in 2024. It’s very, very warm out there, and warm ocean temperatures tend to fuel hurricanes. Seventeen named tropical storms are forecast, and many of them will become hurricanes.
Plus, with cuts to NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Service] and to many other institutions that do scientific research in this country, we’re seeing a degraded weather monitoring and observation system. It’s a dangerous situation.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is being decimated, too. It’s been widely reported that the FEMA director was just recently made aware that there is such a thing as hurricane season. So, you start to wonder how we’re going to be able to get through this. Our ability to monitor and forecast hurricanes has been degraded. And when the hurricane arrives and wreaks havoc, our ability to respond to the emergency is degraded.
Frankly, I think the United States is not as prepared in 2025 as it’s been in many recent years. I bet you’d have to go back several decades — to the 70s, 60s or 50s — to the last time that this country was so disorganized and unprepared to meet a disaster.
The hurricane map in the Atlantic Ocean may be nearly blank now, but forecasters say that may not last much longer, as several signs point to an uptick in activity across the basin.
“The tropical environment should become more conducive for Atlantic hurricane activity in the next few weeks,” said Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach in a July 24 email to USA TODAY.
WPLG-TV hurricane expert Michael Lowry agreed with this prediction, telling USA TODAY that “we’re already seeing longer-range forecast models start to perk up… The deep Atlantic tropical waves coming from Africa have been peppier this week, and July 24’s long-range forecast models jumped from a generally quiet next 15 days to a much busier look for the first part of August.”
With three named tropical storms (Andrea, Barry and Chantal) so far, the number of storms is actually above average for this time of year. “Currently, we’re above-normal for named storms but below normal for all other metrics,” Klotzbach said.
A slow July isn’t unusual: “The season is usually pretty quiet through July,” Klotzbach noted. “On average, we’ve got over 95% of major hurricane activity left to go and still about 93% of ACE left to go. On average, our first hurricane forms in the Atlantic on August 11.”
