Those Summer Nights Are No Longer a Refuge From Extreme Heat

It’s going to be so hot in Texas and across the southern Great Plains that when the sun goes down, the temperature won’t.

Overnight lows will remain above 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 Celsius) in Houston during the next week and will hover in the high 70s in Dallas and Tulsa, Oklahoma, the National Weather Service said. This extends recent trends: Across the U.S. in the past week, there were 230 overnight heat records and only 38 daytime highs, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina.

“It is not good,” said Jerry Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Heatwaves and high overnight temperatures are a bellwether for how hot the Earth is getting: As average temperatures rise, so do those overnight lows