There's a feeling like a hurricane or other natural disaster is bearing down.
At 3:18 pm it's now 111°F. Supposed to go to 113°F.
This is really crazy. I've only ever see such temperatures in Tempe, Arizona, where I lived for a year and a half in the 1990s. Not even in New Mexico. And I don't have air conditioning here. So far I'm surviving with cold showers and fans, but it's still not pleasant. But it doesn't feel dangerous indoors. Right now the relative humidity is only 19%, so the wet bulb temperature is only 71°F (22°F), far below the death threshold of 35°C. I haven't heard of any deaths yet, but that was of yesterday -- today it's 6-7°F higher, but a little less humid. And residences/apartment buildings here aren't made of brick, which I believe was a big factor in the Chicago heat wave of 1995 that killed 739 people, because the buildings didn't cool well down at night.
Perhaps it's time the government subsidized air conditing units for the poor, and the electricity to pay for them.
Here's an interesting map of the degree of the heat dome over southern Canada and northern western US. You can notice the jaggly coast of British Columbia on the left edge of the 4-sigma bubble, and the straight US-Canadian border is right near the bottom of the same bubble. So it says Oregon is only in the 2-sigma range, which surprises me because our normal high for today is 78°F, and we're going to be 35°F above that. (?)
To put climate extremes into perspective we measure against the average. The sigma is the standard deviation of a normal distribution of expected values. In this case the heat dome sigma max is 4.4 - that means it's outside of 99.99% of expected values or a 1/10,000+ chance (1/2) pic.twitter.com/8raIMAngkg
— Jeff Berardelli (@WeatherProf) June 27, 2021
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