Meteorologists in Miami, it is fair to say, are accustomed to drama: sunny-day flooding, severe rainstorms, strong hurricanes.
So it is telling — and scary — that they seem at a loss for words to describe the extreme heat that the city experienced over the past few days, a full month ahead of summer.
“It’s completely crazy, what just happened,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami, said.
“It’s insane,” said John Morales, a meteorologist for ClimaData, a private weather forecasting and consulting firm, and a hurricane specialist at WTVJ-TV, the NBC station in Miami. “Not only is it insane, it is also dangerous.”
They were talking about the heat index, a measure of how hot it really feels outside, taking into account humidity along with temperature. The heat index reached 112 degrees on both Saturday and Sunday, breaking the previous daily record by an astonishing 11 degrees.
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(Bloomberg) — Temperatures will soar across Texas this week, further testing the state’s electrical grid as households and businesses switch on air conditioners to get relief from record seasonal highs.
The heat will also spread across the US Midwest and Northeast, with the potential for record warm overnight low temperatures from Philadelphia to Boston. Still, it’s Texas — whose energy network has faltered during harsh weather in the past — that’s in the spotlight. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has warned that the state’s grid will face extreme weather risks as the situation unfolds across the US.
US grids are already experiencing stress and it’s not even summer — the period when electricity demand soars and consumption tends to touch annual highs. The early arrival of hotter temperatures is taxing power-generating assets when many power plants are offline for repairs and upgrades ahead of the peak summer season. Swaths of the US — from Texas and the Southeast to the Midwest and New England — face supply crunches in the sustained searing heat, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
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