NY.– A wildfire started in Southern California on Friday and has burned more than 20,000 acres as of Monday.
There was another fire last week in the north of this state that caused 29 thousand people to be evacuated.
Both incidents highlight how wildfires are becoming larger and more severe.
Over the weekend, much of the Western United States experienced record-breaking triple-digit temperatures, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, according to forecasters.
Hurricane Beryl, which made history last week as the first Category 5 hurricane on record in the Atlantic, made landfall in eastern Texas as a Category 1 storm Monday morning.
Heavy rain and winds will move into the eastern United States this week.
Judson Jones, a meteorologist and reporter on The New York Times Climate Team, covered those extreme temperature events, using prediction models and speaking with experts to set the record straight.
Although the events reflect a general change in the global climate, Jones sought to analyze them separately as a phenomenon.
This is what he said:
What we are seeing right now with this hurricane is a partial departure from the high pressure systems that are responsible for the heat waves that are happening in the United States.
What’s happening in the Atlantic is exactly the same temperatures that we would typically see in this region in September, which is the peak of hurricane season, so it was not surprising that this one developed and intensified rapidly.
There will likely be a quiet period as dry air blowing in from the west coast of Africa can suppress hurricane formation by limiting moisture in the air and the formation of tropical systems.
Many climate change experts have begun to study what hurricanes will be like in the future and say that warmer ocean temperatures are likely to occur.
The warmer the world gets, the warmer the ocean temperatures will be, and that means we could see more rapid intensification of storms.
It is a realistic expectation that more storms will reach higher categories.
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