Although the upcoming Boston weather forecast calls for highs in the 90s, National Weather Service meteorologist Candice Hrencecin said the situation will be a “noticeable improvement” from heat events earlier in the summer.
“The thing that’ll help keep it from being as bad as previous heat events is actually the fact that the dew points and stuff will actually remain in the 60s instead of the 70s, which kind of lead to more oppressive healing heat indices. So generally, humidity is gonna be pretty moderate,” Hrencecin said.
Monday will see highs in the low- to mid-90s inland with afternoon sea breezes. That heat will peak Wednesday with moderate humidity.
NWS discussions describe how with solar summer – “90 days of highest sun angle” – behind us, the heat will not be as intense as in June and July.
The weather service has held off on issuing heat headlines for today.
But Boston Mayor Michelle Wu declared a heat emergency for the city from Monday through Wednesday, directing the Hub to open cooling centers and urging residents to check on their neighbors.
The latter half of the work week may see scattered, isolated showers on Wednesday in western Massachusetts before hitting Southern New England going into Thursday.
A cold front will also move in, and after the showers move out, Massachusetts can expect a dry weekend, a bit cooler than earlier this week.
Cape Cod will also be a bit cooler throughout the week due to onshore winds.
This week’s heat forecast comes after the “muggiest first two months of summer on record” in the Eastern United States, according to an Associated Press data analysis.
Parts of 27 states and Washington, D.C., had a record amount of days that meteorologists call uncomfortable — with average daily dew points of 65 degrees Fahrenheit or higher — in June and July, according to data derived from the Copernicus Climate Service.
Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service Graphic M.K. Wildeman via Associated Press
And that’s just the daily average. In much of the East, the mugginess kept rising to near tropical levels for a few humid hours.
“This has been a very muggy summer. The humid heat has been way up,” said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central.
Twice this summer climate scientist and humidity expert Cameron Lee of Kent State University measured dew points of about 82 degrees at his home weather station in Ohio. That’s off the various charts that the weather service uses to describe what dew points feel like.
“There are parts of the United States that are experiencing not only greater average humidity, especially in the spring and summer, but also more extreme humid days,” Lee said. He said super sticky days are today stretching out over more days and more land.
For most of the summer, the Midwest and East were stuck under either incredibly hot high pressure systems, which boosted temperatures, or getting heavy and persistent rain in amounts much higher than average, said Zack Taylor, forecast operations chief at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center. What was mostly missing was the occasional cool front that pushes out the most oppressive heat and humidity. That finally came in August and brought relief, he said.
Humidity varies by region. The West is much drier. The South gets more 65-degree dew points in the summer than the North. But that’s changing.
University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd said uncomfortable humidity is moving further north, into places where people are less used to it.
Summers today, he said, “are not your grandparents’ summers.”
Contributing reports from the Associated Press.
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