Living With Climate Change: What is a heat dome? There’s one roasting Texas and the Midwest

The heat index calculates a “real feel” temperature that includes the effects of humidity. Dallas-Fort Worth, for instance, hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit Tuesday when just measuring air temperature, not humidity, as the metro area entered a 40th straight day of temps above 100 degrees F. Down the road, Austin had endured 44 straight days of temperatures above 100 degrees F, crushing the old record of 27 days.

Texas wasn’t the only hot spot. The heat index neared 127 degrees F in parts of Oklahoma and as much as 134 degrees F in Lawrence, Kan.

Very southern Texas found some temperature relief, although had to brace for dangerous winds, when Tropical Storm Harold came ashore early Tuesday, the first hurricane of the 2023 Atlantic season to make landfall.

The August temperature streaks follow the hottest July on record. July accounted for record electricity usage in Texas, which operates its own electrical grid.

High heat forecasts can be built into power-usage plans and Texas does typically have hot summers. But the strings of consecutive days of extreme temperatures put enormous stress on utilities and power lines, at the same time that air conditioning becomes critical to health and safety.

Heat domes defined

A heat dome occurs when the atmosphere traps hot ocean air like a lid over a certain area. It is associated with a blocking jetstream.

Climate change, which is warming our oceans along with the regular patterns of El Nino and La Nina, is seen as a contributing factor to extreme heat. Scientists always emphasize the difference between short-term weather and long-term climate change and they stress that the influence of climate change on blocking jetstream patterns is an active area of research. 

But it is the increased frequency and the worrisome potency of weather extremes that scientists link to human-generated global warming from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, the result of carbon-dioxide and other emissions. Increasingly, the number of new record high temperatures is outpacing the number of record lows.

A team of scientists funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) MAPP Program investigated what triggers heat domes and found the main cause was a strong change in ocean temperatures from west to east in the tropical Pacific Ocean during the preceding winter.

Read: Why the rush to curb climate change? Damaging carbon dioxide is 50% higher than at the dawn of the industrial era

As NOAA scientists explain, imagine a swimming pool when the heater is turned on. Temperatures rise quickly in the areas surrounding the heater jets, while the rest of the pool takes longer to warm up. If one thinks of the Pacific as a very large pool, the western Pacific’s temperatures have risen over the past few decades as compared to the eastern Pacific, creating a strong temperature gradient, or pressure differences that drive wind, across the entire ocean in winter.

In a process known as convection, the gradient causes more warm air, heated by the ocean surface, to rise over the western Pacific, and decreases convection over the central and eastern Pacific. As prevailing winds move the hot air east, the northern shifts of the jet stream trap the air and move it toward land, where it sinks, resulting in heat waves.

Ground conditions can have their own effect. When drought conditions are in place, dry soil heats more easily than moist soil, contributing to the higher temperatures near the ground. And as the climate warms, soils dry out more quickly and drought risks increase, reinforcing the cycle.

(Read more on the relationship between carbon dioxide and long-run temperatures and click here for city-by-city temperature trends.)

The strength of this particular heat dome appears to be topping one that occurred during August 1936, which was in the midst of the “Dust Bowl” that contributed to the Great Depression.