Currently — June 13, 2022

The weather, currently.

A ‘death ridge’ will bring the hottest temperatures in years to parts of the eastern US this week.

Strong thunderstorms from Minneapolis to Chicago to Detroit to Washington DC will kick off the week as a powerful ridge of high pressure will generate stagnant, sultry air more reminiscent of July and August.

In Chicago, high temperatures may reach 100 deg F (37.8 deg C) on Tuesday for the first time since 2012, and heat index values may reach 115 deg F (46.1 deg C) in the Carolinas for the first time in at least that long. Many places east of the Rocky Mountains will be 10 to 25 deg F (5 to 12 deg C) hotter than the long-term average mid-June temperatures for most of the week.

In all, parts of 26 states should see heat indexes topping 100 deg F (37.8 deg C) at some point this week. That a heat wave of this magnitude is underway more than a week before the summer solstice is one more shred of evidence that fossil fuel-driven global heating continues to change the weather. We are in a climate emergency.

—Eric Holthaus

What you need to know, currently.

As the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Sandy approaches — former NWS Meteorologist, and Currently’s own, Gary Szatkowski — shares the lessons learned by meteorologists in the years since Sandy as well as his predictions for the years to come.

Sandy posed a communication challenge for meteorologists, but in the years since the we’ve gotten better at communicating impact to those faced with making the hard decisions in the days leading up to major storms.

Szatkowski says that in the next decade, meteorologists are going to face similar messaging hurdles while trying to express the impacts of climate change when forecasting major storms.

Read the full story here.