The Northeast is warming faster than the rest of the United States

The northeast coast of the United States, from Delaware to Maine, is warming faster than most of the northern hemisphere, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Over the past century, the region’s average summer temperature has risen by 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. (Worldwide, year-round average temperatures have risen by 1.2 degrees Celsius.)

The climatologists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who conducted the study, called the warming in the northeast “exceptional.” The reason, they say, is that ocean temperatures are rising particularly rapidly in the North Atlantic.

The underlying cause is a slowdown in the Atlantic overturning meridian circulation, a conveyor belt-like system that keeps surface waters refreshing in the North Atlantic. Breaking this process allows water to stagnate and heat up faster in the waters off the northeastern United States.

The slowdown could also eventually make other places, like Europe, colder, depriving them of the warm tropical waters that are normally sent north from the Caribbean.

But on the U.S. side, a regional wind pattern also increases the influence of warmer ocean temperatures, sweeping air over the North Atlantic toward the east coast, the study found.

The Northeast, the most densely populated region in the United States, is already experiencing the devastating effects of warming ocean temperatures, including lobster deaths near Cape Cod, Massachusetts, devastating flash floods and more frequent hurricanes and more serious sweeping states like New York. and New Jersey.

Study author Ambarish Karmalkar told the Guardian that extreme heat could also soon become a major problem on the east coast. “The exceptional warming we have observed can have serious consequences for heat stress and human health,” he said.

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