00:00You know, John, you and I talk about this all the time.
00:03You know what I'm going to get at here, because what is often lost on heat waves,
00:08we focus on the day temperatures, but the problem when you get to dew points
00:13and to get to humidity, it never cools off at night.
00:17And that's what really, I think, makes heat waves deadly,
00:20because if you can get temperatures to cool, you can get your location to cool,
00:24but that's not going to happen.
00:25It is not.
00:26And that knew exactly where you're going, Bernie,
00:28after working with you for decades, that look at these overnight low temperatures.
00:32They fall to 81, 82, and 81 there in the middle of the week.
00:38That's little time to recover at night.
00:40This is going to be miserable and dangerous for people without air conditioning especially.
00:45And this really, when you have those kinds of overnight elevated temperatures, Bernie,
00:50that increases the heat stress on people's bodies each day of the heat wave.
00:54This is a dangerous situation, which is going to be made even more dangerous by the fact that there's going
01:00to be people outside in large numbers
01:03celebrating the great holiday this week and into the weekend.
01:07People are going to need to be very careful with managing this extreme heat.
01:11Obviously, here at AccuWeather, we focus on the superior accuracy of our forecast,
01:17but we also focus on the superior accuracy of our communication.
01:22And when it comes to heat wave, we want to give people an idea of what to expect and what
01:28to compare it to.
01:29And that's why we made the AccuWeather Heat Wave Severity Index, John.
01:33That's right.
01:34This is another AccuWeather unique tool that we developed a couple of years ago and rolled out
01:39so that we could help people better understand heat waves and put heat waves into context.
01:45First, we define a heat wave in New York City as three or more consecutive days
01:50where the temperature exceeds 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
01:52That threshold can vary based upon the climate of any individual city.
01:57Then we have the AccuWeather Heat Wave Severity Index, which sums up and keeps adding to throughout a heat wave.
02:05So that's going to have a higher number.
02:07That's the 14 here.
02:08That's going to have a higher number for a longer-lasting or also a more intense heat wave.
02:14And so that allows us to see that that 14 for this upcoming heat wave
02:18is going to be the most intense heat wave of the last couple of years.
02:24And certainly it's the first heat wave of the year in New York City.
02:28And when you go back and look at the statistics, which we've computed for New York City all the way
02:31back to the late 1800s,
02:34we find all kinds of interesting data, including the fact that with this 14 on the AccuWeather Heat Wave Counter
02:40and Severity Index,
02:41that's going to be the second most intense heat wave in New York City since 2000,
02:47only eclipsed by the heat wave in August 2005, which had a heat wave severity index on AccuWeather's scale of
02:55a 15.
02:55So when you put that into context, that's a serious and a strong heat wave.
03:00And again, those overnight temperatures are going to be a big factor as well.
03:05And, you know, I mean, just look at the number 14 total with this heat wave last year,
03:09only 20 and 20, 24, 24 total for the year.
03:14So this puts this in the perspective, John.
03:18And this is something that has the ability to really harm people.
03:23So you need to keep in touch with the AccuWeather forecast and understand how to mitigate the risks.
03:30Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter.
03:32John, thanks for breaking it down for us.
