PENNSYLVANIA, USA — Recent warm temperatures are just a taste of what’s to come as we approach summertime.
As summer nears, the National Weather Service (NWS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have expanded one of their tools to track extreme heat and it’s impacts.
The NWS HeatRisk has previously been available for parts of the western U.S., but is now expanded to cover the entire contiguous United States. The website provides a forecast for heat-related impacts over a 24 hour period in relation to how unusual those temperatures are for any given time of the year.
The HeatRisk is provided on a number and color coded scale of zero to four. A level zero is shaded green and means there is no impact from heat expected, while a level four, shaded in magenta, means there are extreme impacts from heat likely to affect health systems and heat-sensitive industries and infrastructure. This forecast is issued over a 7 day period.
Matt Steinbugl, Lead Meteorologist at NWS State College, says combining this new tool with other parameters like the Heat Index and the WetBulb Globe Temperature, will help the weather service better communicate the dangers that hot stretches of weather can pose.
“I think using the combination of those three tools is really going to give us a good sense of how much of an impact a potential heat event is going to have,” he tells FOX43. “And then we’ll be able to communicate that to the public and other users as well.”
Extreme heat continues to be the number one weather-related killer in the United States. And in a warming climate, officials from NOAA say it’s even more important to track extreme heat stretches and their impacts.
“Climate change is causing more frequent and intense heat waves that are longer in duration, resulting in nearly 1,220 deaths each year in the U.S. alone,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. “HeatRisk is arriving just in time to help everyone, including heat-sensitive populations, prepare and plan for the dangers of extreme heat.”
While the HeatRisk will not show up on your phone’s weather app, it is publicly available on the National Weather Service’s website.
You can always find the latest forecast for Central Pennsylvania here.