What can cities do to survive extreme heat?
By M. Mitchell Waldrop Urban heat waves are getting worse, but better data and timely government action could make them less deadly Read more
This week
Event: Rethinking cities in the face of extreme heat
Wednesday, October 26, 2022 | 9am Pacific | 12pm Eastern | 4pm GMTCities have recently experienced extreme heat waves, causing preventable illness and death. How can we protect people from dangerous heat while also reducing carbon emissions?
From the archives
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter recently captured lively activity in our Sun’s corona, Tereza Pultarova reports at Space.com (with flyby video!). For more on how aspects of the Sun’s upper atmosphere continue to perplex scientists, read our story.
What we’re reading
We built this city
“Welcome to Meltsville,” a road sign proclaims right up top. Today’s high temperature? Sweltering. In this Washington Post thought experiment, a team of graphics reporters walks us through a fictional city and the many ways that things break down during a massive heat wave. Little is spared: Airport runways and repaired potholes turn to goo, old bridges and water mains crack from metal fatigue, some plants and animals drop dead. While dire, Meltsville’s troubles are finite: It’s just one heat wave. The forecast in the real world is more worrisome.
Hot in the C-suite
It’s predicted that by 2050, the number of cities around the world with average summer temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) will nearly triple. Not peak summer temperatures — average. Cities from Athens to Los Angeles are prepping by creating a new professional post: chief heat officer. For Bloomberg, Patrick Sisson writes about the first-ever gathering of such officers in Washington, DC, and how they’re looking to innovate and adapt their cities. Tree-planting, better building designs and revival of Roman-era-style aqueducts: All are on the table.
The future is now
Remember when temperatures in the UK soared above 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) for the first time in recorded history? That was just three months ago. How about the US Pacific Northwest wilting under a heat dome last year? Those and other extreme heat waves have startled scientists, who viewed such events as possible but not necessarily likely, reports Nature’s Alexandra Witze. Their occurrence exposed gaps in climate models and is spurring studies of those models and the various, very real atmospheric dynamics at play. Said one UK-based expert about heat-fueled wildfires in greater London: “It was very sobering, really, and shocking.”
Art & science
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
Red alert
In a stretch of France known around the world for its wine, increasingly hot weather has prompted growers to pluck fruits earlier, before grapes become too sweet. In 2022, the Bordeaux region saw its earliest harvest on record.
The conditions leading up to the harvest, which started in August instead of the typical September, were seen clearly by ECOSTRESS, a heat-sensing device aboard the International Space Station. As part of determining the water stress threshold for plants, ECOSTRESS records land and water surface temperatures. This snapshot, collected on July 5, 2022, was one day in a month of record-breaking heat in the Bordeaux region. The temperatures were so high this past summer that in June, the city banned outdoor public events or any inside events without air conditioning. Scarlet stains denoting high temperatures cross the entire landscape, but the deepest reds are in inner-city regions and bodies of water, far from the farms.
ECOSTRESS paints similarly distressing portraits of urban heat for cities around the world, including Tokyo, Las Vegas and more. Browse the images on NASA’s ECOSTRESS page, and learn more about how climate change is altering wine production, and flavor, in our story.
