Heat domes are a staple of summertime and the source of most heat waves, which cause extreme heat and high temperatures. Here’s a look at how heat domes work.
in the United States and worldwide. At the heart of these heat waves are “heat domes,” sprawling zones of strong high pressure, beneath which the air is compressed and heats up. In recent years, there have been instances ofHot air masses, born from the blazing summer sun, expand vertically into the atmosphere, creating a dome of high pressure that diverts weather systems around them. These heat domes can stall and persist over the same region for days to weeks at a time.
Jane Wilson Baldwin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, explains how feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere combine to make heat domes worse. “When the land surface is drier, it can’t cool itself through evaporation, which makes the surface even hotter, which strengthens the blocking high further,” she said in an interview.“You would be hard-pressed to come up with a metric of heat waves that isn’t getting worse under global warming,” she said, adding that the increasing intensity and duration of heat waves is particularly clear.
One way to gauge the magnitude of a heat dome is to measure the height of the typical halfway point of the lower atmosphere — at the 500 millibar pressure level. The higher this pressure level is, the hotter it is, because hot air is less dense than cold air and expands the atmosphere vertically.For this pressure level to stretch to heights of 600 dekameters, or 19,685 feet, is quite rare, but several heat domes in recent summers have come close to or eclipsed that threshold.
For the nerds: Map showing the 70-year trend in annual 500 mb heights from R1 Reanalysis. 6000 -meter Highs are easier to attain than before.Researchers have linked human-caused climate change to the increasing frequency, size and intensity of heat domes, pumping them up higher into the atmosphere, not unlike adding more air to a hot-air balloon.
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