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Mahesh

12/07/24 10:09 AM IST

Heat domes

In News
  • The entire western United States has come under the grip of a sweltering heatwave, which began recently.
  • Nearly 75 million people are under heat alerts, and temperature records are tumbling.
Heat dome
  • A heat dome is a weather phenomenon where a high-pressure system in the atmosphere traps warm air like a lid on a pot, for an extended period of time.
  • As the warm air is not able to rise upward, the sky remains clear — clouds are formed under the opposite circumstances as the rising warm air cools down, and the water in it condenses out.
  • The high-pressure system allows more sunlight to reach the earth, which results in more warming and drying of soil.
  • This leads to less evaporation and reduces the likelihood of the formation of rain clouds.
  • The longer the heat dome stays in one place, the warmer conditions can get with every passing day. While heat domes cause heatwaves, they can occur without heat domes as well.
Role of Jet Stream
  • A heat dome’s formation is tied to the behaviour of the jet stream — an area of fast-moving air high in the atmosphere that usually helps move weather systems along the Earth’s surface.
  • The  jet stream has a wave-like pattern that keeps moving from north to south and then north again.
  • When these waves get bigger and elongated, they move slowly and sometimes can become stationary. This is when a high-pressure system gets stuck in place, and leads to the occurrence of a heat dome.
Impact of Climate change
  • Scientists are still debating over how climate change is impacting the blocking weather events that cause heat domes.
  • However, they have ascertained that rising global temperatures have made heat domes larger and more intense.
  • A 2021 study carried out by an international team of 27 climate researchers, who were part of the World Weather Attribution, found that searing temperatures recorded during the heat dome in Canada, which occurred in June that year, “would have been virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change”.
  • Another study, published in the journal Nature 2023, indicated that the intensity of heat domes is outpacing the rate of global warming — which means that climate change is fuelling their intensity.
Source- Indian Express

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