Tropical Storm Andrea, first of Atlantic hurricane season, is quickly weakening
MIAMI (AP) — Tropical Storm Andrea, the first tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, was forecast to dissipate by Wednesday after forming at sea Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center said.
The tropical storm was far from land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with maximum sustained winds of 40 mph (65 kph). Andrea is expected to become a post-tropical low as soon as Tuesday night.
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Toronto Star
an hour ago
- Toronto Star
One more sizzling hot day for the eastern US before temperatures plunge 30 degrees
NEW YORK (AP) — A record-smashing heat wave broiled the U.S. East for another day Wednesday, even as thermometers were forecast to soon plunge by as many as 30 degrees in the same areas. The day's heat wasn't expected to be as intense as Tuesday, when at least 50 heat records were matched or broken and 21 places hit triple-digit temperatures. About 127 million Americans remained under National Weather Service heat advisories, down from the previous day. Sizzling temperatures sent utilities scrambling to keep the air conditioning and lights on amid massive demand for power.
Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
One more sizzling hot day for the eastern US before temperatures plunge 30 degrees
NEW YORK (AP) — A record-smashing heat wave broiled the U.S. East for another day Wednesday, even as thermometers were forecast to soon plunge by as many as 30 degrees in the same areas. The day's heat wasn't expected to be as intense as Tuesday, when at least 50 heat records were matched or broken and 21 places hit triple-digit temperatures. About 127 million Americans remained under National Weather Service heat advisories, down from the previous day. Sizzling temperatures sent utilities scrambling to keep the air conditioning and lights on amid massive demand for power. 'It's still going to be, I think, pretty bad across the East,' meteorologist Bob Oravec of the Weather Prediction Center said Wednesday morning. 'I think today is probably the last day of widespread record potential. It might not be quite as hot as yesterday by a few degrees. But still, high temperatures are expected in the upper 90s across a good section of the East.' The weather service warned of 'extreme heat' for a stretch of the country from North Carolina to New York and west to West Virginia. Highs could approach triple digits from New York to Richmond, Oravec said. Temperatures Wednesday morning were 'a little bit warmer than expected' because of northwesterly winds bringing 'warm leftovers from yesterday,' said former NOAA chief scientist Ryan Maue, a private meteorologist. Nantucket, Massachusetts, was above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) when its forecast high was 82. Weather whiplash The high pressure heat dome that has baked the East was forecast to break. A cold front began moving south from New England, bringing with it clouds and cooler temperatures — not only cooler than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius), but cooler than normal. That air mass drawing on cool ocean waters will send temperatures plummeting by the end of the week in Philadelphia, which hit a record high of 101 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, said Ray Martin, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, New Jersey. Air temperatures will be in the low 70s Fahrenheit (20s Celsius). 'It's going to feel like a shock to the system, but it's not anything particularly unusual,' said Martin. Boston's forecast high for Friday is 34 degrees lower than what it hit Tuesday. 'It's going to feel like a different season,' Oravec said. However, it won't last. After one or two days, slightly hotter than normal temperatures are forecast, but not anywhere near the highs from earlier this week, Oravec said. Weather whiplash from one extreme to another occurs more often as the world warms overall from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, scientists said. Records smashed Tuesday was likely the peak of the heat, with Baltimore the king of swelter. The city's high of 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) smashed a previous record by four degrees. At night, when the human body needs cooling, temperatures only dropped to 87 Fahrenheit (30 Celsius). Baltimore was hardly alone. A dozen weather stations were 101 degrees or higher, including two New York airports. Boston hit 102, breaking its old record by seven degrees. Augusta, Maine's 100-degrees also broke its old record by seven degrees. Every coastal state from Maine to South Carolina hit 100 degrees somewhere, with Georgia and Florida clocking in at 99 on Tuesday. 'Generally speaking, the mid-Atlantic areas … don't have to prepare for extreme heat the way Arizona or Texas do,' University of Texas energy engineering professor Michael Webber said in an email. 'So, extreme heat is less familiar and therefore more operationally challenging for them. … And, they haven't built as many new power plants.' Extreme heat caused the road to buckle in two locations on an interstate highway in northern New Jersey. State transportation officials say the impact on the concrete roadway in Morris County on Tuesday afternoon forced some lane closures as temporary repairs were made. Crews then began work to replace the damaged areas and repave those sections. Some downtown Chicago streets will close Wednesday night to repair pavement that has buckled due to hot temperatures amid an ongoing heat wave in the city. 'Pavement failures or blowouts occur when prolonged high temperatures cause the road to expand and buckle up or blow out, resulting in uneven driving surfaces,' the Illinois Department of Transportation said in a statement. In Chesapeake, Virginia, a heat-related malfunction prompted a bridge to remain stuck in the open position. ___ Isabella O'Malley in Philadelphia; Alexa St. John in Detroit; Patrick Whittle in Portland, Maine; Bruce Shipkowski in Trenton, New Jersey; and Christine Fernando contributed to this report. ___ The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
Winnipeg Free Press
10 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Switzerland's ebbing glaciers show a new, strange phenomenon: holes reminiscent of Swiss cheese
RHONE GLACIER, Switzerland (AP) — Climate change appears to be making some of Switzerland's vaunted glaciers look like Swiss cheese: full of holes. Matthias Huss of the glacier monitoring group GLAMOS offered a glimpse of the Rhone Glacier, which feeds the eponymous river that flows through Switzerland and France to the Mediterranean, shared the observation with The Associated Press this month as he trekked up to the icy expanse for a first 'maintenance mission' of the summer to monitor its health. The state of Switzerland's glaciers came into stark and dramatic view of the international community last month when a mudslide from an Alpine mountain submerged the southwestern village of Blatten. The Birch Glacier on the mountain, which had been holding back a mass of rock near the peak, gave way — sending an avalanche into the valley village below. Experts say geological shifts and, to a lesser extent global warming, played a role. Fortunately, the village had been largely evacuated beforehand, but Swiss authorities said a 64-year-old man had gone missing after the incident. Late Tuesday, regional Valais police said they had found and were examining human remains of a person who died in the mudslide. The Alps and Switzerland — home to the most glaciers in any European country by far — have seen them retreat for about 170 years, but with ups and downs over time until the 1980s, he said. Since then, the decline has been steady, with 2022 and 2023 the worst of all. Last year was a 'bit better,' he said. 'Now, this year also doesn't look good, so we see we have a clear acceleration trend in the melting of glaciers,' said Huss, who also is a lecturer at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, ETHZ, said in beaming sunshine and with slushy ice dripping underfoot. Less snow and more heat create punishing conditions The European Union's Copernicus climate center said last month was the second-warmest May on record worldwide, although temperatures in Europe were below the running average for that month compared to the average from 1991 to 2020. Europe is not alone. In a report on Asia's climate released Monday, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization said reduced winter snowfall and extreme summer heat last year 'were punishing for glaciers' — with 23 out of 24 glaciers in the central Himalayas and the Tian Shan range suffering 'mass loss' in 2024. A healthy glacier is considered 'dynamic,' by generating new ice as snow falls on it at higher elevations while melting at lower altitudes: The losses in mass at lower levels are compensated by gains above. As a warming climate pushes up the melting to higher altitudes, such flows will slow down or even stop altogether and the glacier will essentially become 'an ice patch that is just lying there,' Huss said. 'This is a situation we are seeing more and more often on our glaciers: That the ice is just not dynamic anymore,' he said. 'It's just resting there and melting down in place.' This lack of dynamic regeneration is the most likely process behind the emergence and persistence of holes, seemingly caused by water turbulence at the bottom of the glacier or air flows through the gaps that appear inside the blocks of ice, Huss said. 'First the holes appear in the middle, and then they grow and grow, and suddenly the roof of these holes is starting to collapse,' he said. 'Then these holes get visible from the surface. These holes weren't known so well a few years ago, but now we are seeing them more often.' Such an affected glacier, he said, 'is a Swiss cheese that is getting more holes everywhere, and these holes are collapsing — and it's not good for the glacier.' Effects felt from fisheries to borders Richard Alley, a geosciences professor and glaciologist at Penn State University, noted that glacier shrinkage has wide impacts on agriculture, fisheries, drinking water levels, and border tensions when it comes to cross-boundary rivers. 'Biggest worries with mountain glaciers may be water issues — now, the shrinking glaciers are supporting summertime (often the dry season) flows that are anomalously higher than normal, but this will be replaced as glaciers disappear with anomalously low flows,' he said in an email. For Switzerland, another possible casualty is electricity: The Alpine country gets the vast majority of its power through hydroelectric plants driven from its lakes and rivers, and wide-scale glacier melt could jeopardize that. With a whirr of a spiral drill, Huss sends ice chips flying as he bores a hole into the glacier. Then with an assistant, he unfurls a jointed metal pole — similar to the basic glacier-monitoring technology that has existed for decades — and clicks it together to drive it deep down. This serves as a measuring stick for glacier depth. 'We have a network of stakes that are drilled into the ice where we determine the melting of the mass loss of the glacier from year to year,' he said. 'When the glacier will be melting, which is at the moment a speed of about 5 to 10 centimeters (2-4 inches) a day, this pole will re-emerge.' Reaching up over his head — about 2.5 meters (8 feet) — he points out the height of a stake that had been drilled in in September, suggesting that an ice mass had shrunk by that much. In the super-hot year of 2022, nearly 10 meters of vertical ice were lost in a single year, he said. Some glaciers have gone for good The planet is already running up against the target cap increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius in global temperatures set in the Paris Climate Accord of 2015. The concerns about global warming that led to that deal have lately been overshadowed by trade wars, conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and other geopolitical issues. 'If we manage to reduce or limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, we couldn't save this glacier,' Huss said, acknowledging many Swiss glaciers are set to disappear in the future. As a person, Huss feels emotion. As a glaciologist, he is awestruck by the speed of change. 'It's always hard for me to see these glaciers melting, to even see them disappearing completely. Some of my monitoring sites I've been going to for 20 years have completely vanished in the last years,' he said. 'It was very sad — if you just exchange this beautiful, shiny white with these brittle rocks that are lying around.' 'But on the other hand,' he added, 'it's also a very interesting time as a scientist to be witness to these very fast changes.' ___ Keaten reported from Geneva. ___ The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
