For two straight weeks, high temperatures in Del Rio, Texas have exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit each day — with nighttime temperatures setting records and offering no relief.
A man cools off by Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday.“There are a number of studies on health impacts that show nighttime temperatures are particularly important,” said Ben Zaitchik, a professor in the Earth and planetary sciences department at Johns Hopkins University who studies extreme heat. “The body’s accumulated heat stress can lead to all kinds of complications and the ability of the body to relax at night can be critical.
“We’ve had a couple stations, mostly urban ones, that have come close to having periods of time with record minimum temperatures — San Antonio and Houston,” he said. “It takes a while for our heart to become hot, before you see something like a heart attack,” she said. “We have behavioral mechanisms — it’s hot, we try to find a place to cool down. We have physiological mechanisms — sweating. There’s a real effort to bring that core temperature down on the behavioral and physiological side.”
The toll of heat is often underestimated in part because its cumulative stresses can exacerbate underlying health conditions. After a heat wave is complete, researchers will compare death data to prior years, control for other factors and then tally the number of “excess deaths” — people who would not have otherwise died if not for extreme temperatures.
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