Extreme heat has become more common—as both research and lived experience show—but when it arrives is a different question.
Extreme heat has become more common—as both research and lived experience show—but when it arrives is a different question. A new study finds that rather than occurring only during warm seasons, extreme heat events have become more frequent in the months before and after, too.
That timing matters. Extreme heat is harder on the body when it comes before people have acclimated to the season, or if it comes after people have already had to endure months of it. It’s also harder for communities to prepare for, since cooling centers and heat alerts are often organized around a summer calendar.
“In some places, we have a larger expansion of extreme heat during the spring, before the traditional heat season starts. In other places, there’s a much faster expansion of the heat season into fall,” says Catherine Ivanovich, lead author of the new study, which appears in AGU Advances. Ivanovich is a climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is affiliated with the Columbia Climate School.
Read More at: Columbia Climate School
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