Dr. James Elsner participated in the Policy Pub in September 2019. To listen to his pub navigate here.

Summer is here and it’s hot. I love it. I loved summer in Milwaukee as a kid but it was always way too short. Not here. Summer starts in May and runs through most of September. Perfect. But things are changing. It’s getting hotter. By hotter I don’t mean more extreme heat. I mean more hot days and hot nights. We define a hot day as one during which the high temperature reaches or exceeds 100° F (37.8° C). A hot night is defined as one during which the low temperature fails to drop below 77° F (25° C). The official record from the Tallahassee airport shows an upward trend in the number of hot days at a rate of 2% per year and a more pronounced upward trend in the number of hot nights at a rate of 4.5% per year. Increasingly frequent hot days and nights result from more and longer hot events (consecutive hot days/nights). Read more about our research at EarthArXiv.

Dr. James Elsner is the Earl B. and Sophia H. Shaw professor and chair of the Department of Geography.

The featured image is from Egypt Independent