Get ready for hotter, muggier, stormier summers

Get ready for hotter, muggier, stormier summers MIT researchers have found that an atmospheric condition called an inversion determines how oppressive heat waves get and how long they last—and the phenomenon is getting more common in parts of the United States. A long stretch of humid heat followed by a powerful thunderstorm is a familiar weather pattern in the tropics, but it’s also becoming more common in midlatitude regions such as the US Midwest. A recent study by two MIT scientists identifies a key atmospheric condition that determines how hot, humid, and stormy such a region can get: inversions, in which a layer of warm air settles over cooler air. Inversions were already known to act as an atmospheric blanket that traps pollutants at ground level. Now Funing Li, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences…