Democratic Senator: Cost of expanding forecasting technology to detect extreme weather events is ‘worth it'
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CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Afternoon showers return to South Florida mid-week
South Florida's hot and dry weather pattern is in for a change over the next few days as the rain returns and brings some relief from the heat. On Tuesday morning, temperatures hovered in the low 80s across the region. With the heating of the day, they will climb into the lower 90s for the afternoon. Despite "feels like" temperatures returning to the triple digits for the early afternoon, no heat advisories are in effect for South Florida. Heat index values, which take into account the temperature and the humidity, will range from the upper 90s to 103 degrees. The National Weather Service issues a heat advisory when the heat index is expected to reach 105 degrees, or higher, and last for at least two hours. The NEXT Weather team is tracking a 50-60% chance of scattered showers and storms in the afternoon on Tuesday, favoring Broward and Miami-Dade counties, as moisture moves in from the east. The chance of rain will drop after sunset. On Wednesday and Thursday, there is a 50% chance for scattered showers and storms. By Friday, Saharan dust and drier air will move in. This will lower the chance of rain for the weekend and bring back hotter conditions with afternoon highs in the lower to mid-90s.
CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Summer beauty across Maryland Tuesday, dangerous heat to return
Some of summer's nicest weather will greet us across the state of Maryland today. The weather is a perfect prescription for comfort including comfortably warm temperatures, low humidity, and plenty of sunshine. Humidity will begin to build Wednesday, but the heat will still be manageable, so we will enjoy another very good outdoor weather day. The next round of heat and humidity begins to grow tough Thursday and turns potentially dangerous Friday through the weekend if heat preparations for the body aren't taken. A strengthening ridge of high pressure will bring a return of very hot and muggy conditions to not only Maryland, but most of the Mid-Atlantic. High temperatures Friday afternoon will soar into the mid to upper 90s, and the heat index will likely surpass 100 degrees. The WJZ First Alert Weather Team has declared Friday a First Alert Weather Day for potentially dangerous heat and humidity. Please add in plenty of water, breaks inside the A/C, and limiting time outdoors during the hottest part of the day. The intense heat and extremely high humidity levels will continue into the weekend. Despite high temperatures a few degrees cooler than Friday, the air will feel even hotter with the incredibly high humidity levels. Highs Saturday afternoon will top out in the middle 90s with feels like temperatures 100° to 108°. Sunday will be another sweltering hot and humid day with highs near 90° and feels like temperatures will top out near 100° to 105°. A weak front may stall across our area or just south of us on Monday. Depending on the location of the boundary, more hot and muggy weather can be expected with highs in the upper 80s to lower 90s and feels like temperatures will into the 90s. Highs this weekend will remain in the low 90s with tropical humidity, pushing heat index values near or above 100. Overnight lows will struggle to fall below the 70s. Any storms that develop will be capable of producing significant rainfall totals over a short period of time, raising concerns for localized flooding. The combination of intense heat and humidity will be fuel for scattered to numerous thunderstorms Saturday and Sunday, especially during the afternoon and evening hours. A weak cold front to our north will slowly ease south over the weekend triggering clusters of strong to severe storms. The strongest storms will have numerous and dangerous cloud to ground lightning strikes, blinding downpours, damaging winds, and hail. The WJZ First Alert Weather Team has tagged Saturday and Sunday as Alert Days for this combination of brutal heat and humidity along with the possibility of powerful storms. Saturday the storms should be focused mid to late afternoon through the evening hours. Sunday the storms may develop a bit earlier in the day and continue into the mid-evening hours. While this weekend won't be a washout, please keep an eye to the sky and if you hear thunder roar, go indoors. There have been large numbers of people struck by lightning this summer while enjoying time outside. Stay with the WJZ First Alert Weather Team for more updates on the timeline and intensity of this weekend's heat and storms.
Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Atlantic
All Praise Shade
Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The fatalities can sometimes go unnoticed, perhaps because the danger is invisible: There's no twister that uproots a neighborhood and no flood that sucks it underwater, nor billions of dollars in property damage. Instead, heat's imprint is seen in empty streets, work slowdowns, cognitive decline, and hospital bills. When autumn arrives and temperatures relent, heat leaves no discernable trace. The Earth is getting hotter. In many places on the planet, summer is already two to three weeks longer than in the 1950s. By the end of the century, the warm season in the United States could last six months, and extreme temperatures could force us to spend much of it indoors. Supercharged heat waves will settle over cities for weeks at a time and cause many people to die. Others will suffer heart attacks, kidney disease, and brain damage. What we now call winter will be a brief, two-month interregnum that feels more like spring. Reducing society's consumption of fossil fuels is necessary for preventing worse-yet climate change. But even if every single power source becomes a renewable one and we stop emitting carbon, the planet's surface won't start cooling. The temperature will continue to rise for a few years before gradually leveling off. It will take 'many, many centuries,' NASA estimates, to end the global-greenhouse effect. It is a sobering truth that cutting emissions isn't enough. We also need to figure out how to live on a new Earth. What if the key to that life is older than civilization itself? We need to manage heat to live. And we have an effective and democratic way of doing it: shade. Shade makes long waits for the bus more comfortable. Shade helps keep farmworkers safe when they harvest fruits and vegetables under an unforgiving sun. And shade cools urban environments, improving residents' chance of surviving blazing summers. 'We all know that cities are cooler when we have shade, but we're not really planning for it,' V. Kelly Turner, an urban-planning and geography professor at UCLA, said on CNN. 'In the future, that's something that cities are going to need to do, is intentionally think about: What does shade infrastructure look like?' Turner believes that shade could be America's next long-term investment in public health. What safe drinking water and clean air were to the 20th century, shade could be to the climate-changed 21st. Scientific models bear her out. If we can get emissions under control and put the planet on a path to moderate warming, then by 2050, getting out of the sun could be the difference between unsafe heat and a livable environment. One obvious way the planet can get more shade is more trees. We evolved in forests, and some of our oldest myths and stories unfold under their canopies. Hippocrates taught medicine under a plane tree, and Ovid found bittersweet beauty in a laurel's leaves. The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna slept under a miraculous poplar whose shadow never moved, and Buddha found enlightenment by meditating under a ficus tree. Christian and Muslim heavens alike are cooled by trees' perpetual shade. Tree shade is where public space was born and civic identities are forged. In hot climates, people naturally prefer to confer, conduct commerce, and gossip out of the sun's permanent glare. They spend far more time in shady parks or temple courtyards than in sunny ones. They linger and relax, and that engenders more interactions, and possibly even stimulates social cohesion. It's true in arid cities, humid regions, and even temperate zones with short summers. People want to be in shade. They muse longer, pray more peacefully, and find strength to walk farther. Perhaps because we've become so adept at cooling inside spaces with air conditioning, we've forgotten the importance of cooling outside spaces, too. There is no technology that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree. These communal parasols are also misting machines that dissipate heat. It's hard to feel that effect under one or two of them, but get enough trees together and an urban summer can be as fresh as a rural spring, a feat with major implications for energy use and public health. Where tree-planting isn't viable, cities must invest in other types of public infrastructure that cast shade. Throughout Los Angeles, on streets that are too cramped and paved over to support green canopies, the preferred protections aren't arboreal but artificial, such as the pop-up tents of taqueros and the cheerful rainbow umbrellas of fruit vendors. In Phoenix, a desert city that struggles to nourish an urban forest, common tools include sidewalk screens, frilly metal filters, and soaring photovoltaic canopies. These interventions are more effective than many might expect. Ariane Middel, an Arizona State University urban-climate researcher who runs the school's Sensable Heatscapes and Digital Environments (SHaDE) Lab, surveyed students and staff as they strolled through the shadows that solar panels cast on a Tempe campus thoroughfare. More than any change in ambient temperature, humidity, or wind, the mere presence of shade was the only significant predictor of outdoor comfort. Shade's effectiveness is a function of physics. It depends on the material properties of the sun-blocking objects that cast it—how they reflect, absorb, and transmit different wavelengths of energy in sunlight. It depends on the intensity of that light and the extent of the shade thrown. (A telephone pole that casts a perfect shadow on your body does nothing to stop the solar heating of the surfaces around you.) And it depends on the biology of the person who receives it. Middel has come as close as anyone to adding up all these factors. She praises humble umbrellas and plastic sails, because their shade feels like taking 30 degrees off the afternoon sun, which is about as good as shade cast by a tree. Ultimately, she finds that a city itself can offer the most relief in the shadows of arcaded sidewalks and looming skyscrapers. The Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunts growth, a belief that presaged a modern fixation on the healthiness of sunlight. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, doctors and public-health advocates feared that darkness itself caused the poor health of urban slum-dwellers. It was a vector of disease, where contagions bred and spread, and the murkiness also encouraged licentiousness and other urban vices. Some literally believed sunlight was the best disinfectant. Solar codes were written into urban plans, and new materials and technologies allowed architects to design brighter buildings flooded with natural light. Now we're beginning to see how a solar fetish may be maladaptive. In New York, a recent summer saw a throng of neighborhood activists protest the construction of a 16-story office tower, with signs to Save Our Light. They did this while huddling in the shadow of another building. As intense heat bears down, we have to see shade as a basic human right. We have forgotten that shade is a natural resource. We don't grasp its importance, and we don't appreciate its promise for a better future. Loggers and farmers cut down forests, forcing animals to flee and land to turn fallow. Engineers ignore time-honored methods of keeping out heat, locking us into mechanical cooling systems that fail during blackouts. And urban planners denude shady parks and pave neighborhoods with heat-sucking roads, only to drive us mad with the infernal conditions. But shade is a path to a better future—if we just learn to value it again, and design for it in the places we live.
