What was different about the deadly, record-breaking heat wave in June 2021 that made it so much more extreme than anything the Pacific Northwest had experienced before?
What was different about the deadly, record-breaking heat wave in June 2021 that made it so much more extreme than anything the Pacific Northwest had experienced before?
Like a doctor diagnosing a patient, Portland State climate scientist Paul Loikith and former PSU master's student and current Washington State University Vancouver Ph.D. student Dmitri Kalashnikov sought out to provide a detailed meteorological analysis of the progression of the heat wave, comparing the atmospheric conditions associated with the 2021 event with other historical events. Their findings are published in the journal Monthly Weather Review.
"It's like taking the symptoms and diagnosing what it was that happened to cause something so severe to happen to the system," said Loikith, an associate professor of geography and director of PSU's Climate Science Lab. "We looked into a bunch of different factors that have been known to drive heat waves in the region to see if they were there with this heat wave. Were they normal but way more severe, or did something unique happen that we haven't seen before?"
Loikith said the heatwave, in many ways, shared the same meteorological features and processes as other heatwaves in the Pacific Northwest — but every aspect of it was stronger.
Read more at Portland State University
Image: Daytime high temperatures across the western U.S. on June 28, 2021, according to data from NOAA's Real-Time Mesoscale Analaysis/URMA. (climate.gov via Portland State University)
