US West Set to Sizzle This Summer While Northeast Stays Cooler

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(Bloomberg) — The US West and Gulf Coast are set to broil this summer while the rest of the nation may face dreary and cool days — thanks in part to El Niño.

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The US Climate Prediction Center sees the western and southern US hot through July 10, with the Upper Great Lakes region and parts of the Northeast set for below-normal temperatures.

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The forecast owes much of its pattern to conditions across the Pacific Ocean, including the emergence of El Niño. The US declared the phenomenon underway last week, with conditions gathering strength and raising risks of heat waves, severe drops in rainfall and flooding in parts of the world.

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“Usually in developing El Niño summers it tends to be hot in the Northwest, not hot in the Midwest and Northeast,” said Jonathan Erdman, senior meteorologist for the Weather Channel app, which is owned by the Weather Company LLC. “So, this is kind of acting according to script so far.”

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The locked-in pattern means dryness will likely continue across the western US, raising water supply issues for many regions that have been starved by last winter’s snow drought. The threat of wildfires across the region will rise as well, especially for Northern California, Oregon and Washington east to Colorado, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. 

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Meanwhile, cooler temperatures in large cities in the Midwest and Northeast will also limit energy demand. The milder outlook for those regions prompted the Commodity Weather Group to drop 1.1 cooling degree days — a measurement of how temperature affects energy demand — off its forecast on Wednesday.

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June is coming in cooler than four of the last five for the eastern US, said Matt Rogers, president of the Commodity Weather Group. Overall, the eastern US will probably be close to normal through the summer, but conditions in the Indian Ocean may actually push the region to become a bit warmer.

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North Pacific marine heat waves are also playing a role in this summer’s forecast by influencing weather patterns, Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said in an interview.

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“These heat waves have been expanding and intensifying in the past couple of decades thanks to human-caused warming, but their location in the Pacific shifts around each year,” she said. “For the past several months, a blob of warmer-than-normal water has been parked west of Mexico and Southern California.”

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The resulting high temperatures build and soils dry out from California to Colorado, which amplifies the heat, according to Francis. This pattern also spurs on severe thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes, which have been plaguing the US from Chicago to Washington, DC for the past week and New York on Thursday.

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