From Heat Domes to Wet Bulbs, a New Glossary for Talking About Extreme Heat
The words you’ll need to know when discussing the weather.
The weather was once a thing you discussed as small talk with a neighbor. With each passing summer, though, we’re learning to talk about the weather as if it’s life or death—which it increasingly can be.
Heat has dominated the global conversation recently amid the hottest summer ever recorded and a spate of climate-change-fueled disasters, from huge wildfires in Greece and Canada, to a record string of 110F-plus days that had doctors using ice-filled body bags to cool Phoenix residents, to supercharged hurricanes in the Atlantic basin.