Nowhere Should Expect a Cool Summer
Even a less punishing season than recent summers would be hotter than historical norms. The weeks leading up to summer ring with anticipation. Here come beach days and lazy evenings on the grass and fingers sticky with ice cream. Here come the minor irritationssweaty clothing and sunburns and the constant tang of DEET. And buzzing beneath all of that, a twang of uneasy dread: Here come the scorching afternoons, the floods, the fires, the hurricanes. Already, a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest is breaking records , with many places more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit above the seasonal normtemperatures that climate change has made as much as five times more likely . Typhoon season has struck the other side of the globe. The exact severity and frequency of the coming heat, fires, and tropical storms is uncertain, but years of record temperatures , sweeping wildfires , and 100-year hurricanes and floods have established a terrible, if loose, standard for what the next few months might bring. Not a sliver of the U.S. should expect a cool summer, according to the NOAA Climate Prediction Centers latest three-month outlook : The Eastern Seaboard, Texas, and parts of the Southwest have the highest odds of seeing overall temperatures elevated over the season. Other areas are at risk of more extreme heat, especially parts of the High Plains experiencing prolonged , severe drought , such as Kansas and Oklahoma. When the land lacks moisture and vegetation, all the energy from the sun goes into heating the ground and then the near-surface temperature, says Jon Gottschalck, who runs the operational-prediction branch of the CPC. Read: Here comes the bad season These possibilities reflect a clear long-term trend: more frequent heat waves, stronger heat waves, says Ed Kearns, the chief data officer at First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that models climate risk . Those heat waves, in turn, can produce heavier rainfall and powerful floodswarm air holds more water vaporand extend droughts, Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Columbia University, told me via email. With heat also comes the risk of wildfires, although perhaps not any as catastrophic as those of 2020 and 2021 . After years of drought, an especially wet season on the West Coast is delaying, for now, the start of fire season . But once summer sets in, bringing hot and dry days, even welcome winter and spring rain can cut more than one way. Plentiful precipitation and snowpack mean that mountainous areas, including in California, Utah, and the Southwest, are in good shape heading into fire season, says Nick Nauslar, a predictive-services meteorologist at the National Interagency Fire Center (although a prolonged heat wave could quickly reverse those conditions ). By contrast, in western rangelands at lower elevations, that precipitation has grown copious grass and underbrush, which pretty much dries out along the West every summer by the time you get to August and September, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. Large amounts of cured grass, in turn, can feed more severe fires in grasslands, woodlands, and the chaparral. Further north, extended drought in Washington and Oregon could trigger an early wildfire season; across the border, fires in Alberta and British Columbia are already sending smoke into the United States. Wildfire predictions largely deal in potential the events that spark devastating flames, such as drought followed by dry lightning followed by strong winds, are hard to predict in advance. Still, the warming climate, combined with human construction and forest-management practices that have provided more fuel, means that fires are becoming more intense and destructive. Although their severity and location will vary throughout years and locales, Nauslar told me, there are always fires. Read: Why California cant catch a break And there are always hurricanes. Meteorologists at Colorado State University , North Carolina State University , and the University of Pennsylvania have all predicted in the vicinity of 15 named tropical storms, which would be typical of the past decade-plus. CSU and NCSU estimate that roughly six of those are expected to become hurricanes, of which two or three could become major hurricanes. These forecasts are uncertain: CSUs tropical-storm modeling group, for instance, which predicted a slightly below-average hurricane season, stressed that the years with atmospheric and sea conditions most similar to 2023s exhibited a wide range of outcomes, from below-normal seasons to hyperactive seasons. Two factorssea temperatures and unique atmospheric conditionsare pulling predictions in opposite directions, Alex DesRosiers, a CSU atmospheric scientist, told me over email. High sea-surface temperatures should drive more activity, because tropical storms pull energy from warm water. But the likely arrival of El Ninowhich tears apart and weakens hurricanes as they form in the Atlanticwould decrease storm activity. What can change the forecast and what we are watching intently for is the strength of the potential El Nino, DesRosiers said. A weaker El Nino, like that of 2004, would likely not counteract exceptionally warm waters; a strong El Nino might be enough. Timing matters too: The full effects of El Nino usually come in fall or winter, meaning the earlier half of hurricane season could be worse, Gottschalck told me. Even if this hurricane season proves to be a (much-needed) lull, the long-term trend is toward more frequent and more severe storms hitting the United States. Global warming might alter steering winds in the atmosphere to push storms onto the coast and decrease vertical wind shear, which will strengthen those storms before they make landfall, says Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at Pacific Northwest National Library who has studied the phenomenon . More and more storms are also rapidly intensifying , their wind speeds rising by at least 35 miles per hour in less than a day, likely due to climate change. Any hurricane can be devastating, especially as rising temperatures and sea levels worsen flooding: It only takes one storm to make it an active hurricane season for you, DesRosiers told me. Every wildfire and heat wave, too, threatens to upend lives and livelihoods. Even as some parts of the country could face record-breaking devastation, the coming months may not prove uniformly, uniquely terrible; they may align with the hottest months of recent years or be somewhat less punishing than the summers weve just experienced. Even so, a note of disquiet remains. Each of those summers has been out of line with the rest of history; this years almost certainly will be too.