Sweltering temperatures dominated weather maps across the United States in July 2005 as a heat wave rolled over the country. Between July 12 and July 19, the heat sat over the southwest, where Arizona, California, Nevada, and New Mexico all experienced days of above-normal temperatures. By the following week, the heat had spread to the Midwest and East.
Credit: Jesse Allen/NASA Earth Observatory.
Several American Geophysical Union scientists are available to comment on the science of heat waves and their possible impacts on humans and ecosystems, including the physical mechanisms behind heat waves, connections between climate change and extreme weather, and heat wave effects on water resources and public health.
Kate Evans leads the Computational Earth Sciences Group as part of the Computational Science and Engineering Division and the Climate Change Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She develops global climate models to use the world’s largest supercomputers and evaluates their fidelity to capture climate behavior at many scales. With these models, she studies the connections between global climate, weather anomalies and sea level rise.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +1 (865) 576-6517
Jennifer Francis is a Research Professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She has taught courses in satellite remote sensing and climate-change issues and also co-founded and co-directed the Rutgers Climate and Environmental Change Initiative. Presently she studies the Arctic climate system and connections between climate change and extreme weather.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +1 (732) 688-2382
Alexander (Sasha) Gershunov is a Research Meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on interrelated aspects of weather, climate and society. His professional interests include understanding the links between regional weather extremes and large-scale climate variability and change, extreme weather and climate impacts on wildfire, energy, ecosystems, water resources and public health, climate influence on society and human influence on climate.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +1 (858) 336-2516
Radley Horton is an Associate Research Professor of ocean and climate physics at Lamont Doherty Earth Institute of Columbia University in New York. His areas of expertise and interest include changes in the statistics of heat waves, physical mechanisms behind heat waves and societal impacts ranging from public health to infrastructure.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +1 (646) 320-9938
Ben Zaitchik is an Associate Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He works on understanding, managing, and coping with climate and water variability, including atmospheric dynamics and local land characteristics associated with extreme heat events.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +1 (410) 375-4814
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