Heat Waves
A heat wave is a prolonged period of excessively hot weather, which may be accompanied by high humidity. While definitions vary, a heat wave is measured relative to the usual weather in the area and relative to normal temperatures for the season. Temperatures that people from a hotter climate consider normal can be termed a heat wave in a cooler area if they are outside the normal climate pattern for that area. The term is applied both to routine weather variations and to extraordinary spells of heat which may occur only once a century. Severe heat waves have caused catastrophic crop failures, thousands of deaths from hyperthermia, and widespread power outages due to increased use of air conditioning.
Read more about Heat Waves: Definitions, How They Occur, Health Effects
Famous quotes containing the words heat and/or waves:
“Friendship is evanescent in every man’s experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics—none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)