(ETH) – The heatwave baking the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada, is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans. By one measure it is more rare than a once in a 1,000-year event — which means that if you could live in this particular spot for 1,000 years, you’d likely only experience a heat dome like this once, if ever.
Portland, Oregon, has already broken its all-time record hottest temperature at 108 degrees on Saturday and the peak of the heatwave has not even been reached yet. Canada is expected to register the nation’s all-time highest temperature before the event is done. These are extremely dangerous numbers, especially in a region not used to heat like this, where many people do not have air conditioning.
By Monday, some — if not all — of the all-time record highs seen below are forecast to break, with many more cities not listed here expected to achieve the same feat. The heat is being caused by a combination of a significant atmospheric blocking pattern on top of a human-caused climate-changed world where baseline temperatures are already a couple to a few degrees higher than nature intended. READ MORE
In Seattle, residents had never experienced heat the likes of which enveloped the city Sunday. Temperatures in the Emerald City topped out at 104 degrees F, a new all-time high for a place that’s more commonly thought of for its rain than its heat. Even at its coolest, the temperature never dropped below 73 F, a record-high minimum for Seattle.
In Everson, Washington, located about 100 miles north of Seattle, the heat proved so extreme that roads and sidewalks buckled. State officers shared photos of the cracked roadways, which rendered the streets unsafe and caused detours.
In Yakima, located in the southeastern portion of the state, other Twitter users shared photos of sidewalks buckling under the heat and popping out of the ground. Dr. Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington, told AccuWeather National Reporter Bill Wadell that she was particularly concerned for high-risk residents of the area, such as the elderly. READ MORE
AccuWeather’s team of expert forecasters were describing the then-upcoming heatwave as “unprecedented”, “life-threatening” and “historic” as early as the middle of last week, and these descriptions have been accurate in the first days of the Northwest scorcher.
The weekend marked the beginning of the extended stretch of extreme temperatures. Portland, Oregon, a city that typically experiences temperatures in the middle to upper 70s in late June, soared to a staggering 112 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, breaking the all-time record high of 108 set just a day before. Prior to the current heatwave, the highest temperature ever recorded in the city was 107 set once in July of 1965 and twice in August of 1981.
Portland is also expected to obliterate its daily record high of 100 on Monday and possibly set an all-time high-temperature record for the third straight day. AccuWeather is predicting a high of 113 on Monday, which would make it the hottest day ever recorded in the city. The highest temperature ever recorded in the state of Oregon is 117, which was set in Umatilla on July 27, 1939. READ MORE
