How can we quantify the coming heat wave?
We all know there's a big heat wave coming for the East this week, but this is the first week of summer, so what's the big deal? Meteorologists sometimes have trouble communicating extreme events such as these; people say "it's supposed to be hot, it's summer!"
Eric Fisher tweeted a great map yesterday quantifying the threat, but I wanted to go a step further and explain it, to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what we meteorologists think when we see a map like this:
Here's the translation that I posted to Facebook:
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The humidity is also a big deal with this weekend's heat wave. We don't generally have much past data, and no "normal" data for the Heat Index (Apparent Temperature) or AccuWeather RealFeel temperature, so it's hard to gauge how this heat wave will
, compared to normal, but what about the timing? It won't be super hot everywhere every day through the weekend. As a result, we have these two very unique maps that can help you prepare to sweat. Because the heat and the humidity won't hit at the same time, we've created a map showing arrival times for both:


We can also look at the forecasts, and they are literally off the charts with the NWS predicting Heat Indexes over 115 degrees F over a significant area Thursday (shown below) through Sunday (when it moves into the Northeast). I'm told we'll have a RealFeel map soon.

And finally, we can ask ourselves how unusual this heat wave will be for any particular day by looking at the number of potential daily records assuming the NWS forecasts are correct. For Sunday, nearly every station in New York state is likely to set a daily record high (i.e. it had never, in recorded history, been that hot in that place on that day).

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