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Independence, MO —
Pour another iced tea. Better yet, ice water. This is going to last awhile.
Tuesday’s high of 100 kicked off what is expected to be at least a week of triple-digit temperatures, and the metro area is under an excessive heat warning into the weekend.
“Hot is the word for the week,” Chris Bowman, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Pleasant Hill, said in an online briefing Tuesday.
It reached 100 Tuesday afternoon at Kansas City International Airport, and more is coming: 101 today, 102 Thursday, 101 Friday, 99 Saturday, then 101 Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, according to the Weather Service. None of those would threaten any heat records. The Weather Service forecast goes out for a week, but in his briefing Bowman suggested the high heat might linger well past that.
Officials are advising people to take it easy, drink plenty of water, spend at least some time each day in the air-conditioning, and check on others. (See related story.)
Even that iced tea is an OK but not perfect idea. Caffeine bumps up the body’s temperature.
“Water has got to be the liquid that they’re using,” Independence Health Director Larry Jones emphasizes.
Although the relative humidity is low, thanks to the extremely dry weather, the heat index is expected be high enough – at least 105 – for officials to post the excessive heat warning. It begins at noon today and runs through 8 p.m. Saturday for six counties in the immediate Kansas City area: Jackson, Clay, Platte, Leavenworth, Wyandotte and Johnson. A far wider area is under a heat advisory, but officials point out that urban areas suffer more because all of the buildings, tar roofs and asphalt streets collect heat during the day and release it slowly overnight, so temperatures don’t fall as much and that sets the stage for temps to spike the next day. Overnight lows are expected to be in the upper 70s or even 80 degrees for the next week.
No rain is in the forecast, and many parts of the metro area haven’t had any rain for nearly four weeks. The drought continues to worsen, and on Tuesday the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared all 114 counties in Missouri as disaster areas, opening the way for federal aid for farmers. The state's corn and soybean crops in particular have been hurt by the severe shortfall of rain since spring, a problem compounded by high heat.
Another problem sometimes worsened by the heat is the concentration of ground-level ozone, which can aggravate breathing conditions such as asthma. However, today’s skycast for the metro area is yellow, meaning concentrations are up but not high enough to post an alert. There have been eight alert days so far this year – the same as in all of 2011 – but none since last Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Pour another iced tea. Better yet, ice water. This is going to last awhile.
Tuesday’s high of 100 kicked off what is expected to be at least a week of triple-digit temperatures, and the metro area is under an excessive heat warning into the weekend.
“Hot is the word for the week,” Chris Bowman, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Pleasant Hill, said in an online briefing Tuesday.
It reached 100 Tuesday afternoon at Kansas City International Airport, and more is coming: 101 today, 102 Thursday, 101 Friday, 99 Saturday, then 101 Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, according to the Weather Service. None of those would threaten any heat records. The Weather Service forecast goes out for a week, but in his briefing Bowman suggested the high heat might linger well past that.
Officials are advising people to take it easy, drink plenty of water, spend at least some time each day in the air-conditioning, and check on others. (See related story.)
Even that iced tea is an OK but not perfect idea. Caffeine bumps up the body’s temperature.
“Water has got to be the liquid that they’re using,” Independence Health Director Larry Jones emphasizes.
Although the relative humidity is low, thanks to the extremely dry weather, the heat index is expected be high enough – at least 105 – for officials to post the excessive heat warning. It begins at noon today and runs through 8 p.m. Saturday for six counties in the immediate Kansas City area: Jackson, Clay, Platte, Leavenworth, Wyandotte and Johnson. A far wider area is under a heat advisory, but officials point out that urban areas suffer more because all of the buildings, tar roofs and asphalt streets collect heat during the day and release it slowly overnight, so temperatures don’t fall as much and that sets the stage for temps to spike the next day. Overnight lows are expected to be in the upper 70s or even 80 degrees for the next week.
No rain is in the forecast, and many parts of the metro area haven’t had any rain for nearly four weeks. The drought continues to worsen, and on Tuesday the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared all 114 counties in Missouri as disaster areas, opening the way for federal aid for farmers. The state's corn and soybean crops in particular have been hurt by the severe shortfall of rain since spring, a problem compounded by high heat.
Another problem sometimes worsened by the heat is the concentration of ground-level ozone, which can aggravate breathing conditions such as asthma. However, today’s skycast for the metro area is yellow, meaning concentrations are up but not high enough to post an alert. There have been eight alert days so far this year – the same as in all of 2011 – but none since last Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
