With less than a month to go until summer, weather forecasters have been dropping some troubling news about what might be in store. AccuWeather had already predicted an especially active season — which begins June 1 — with up to 10 hurricanes out at sea, and its meteorologists are now forecasting a hotter-than-normal summer on land. Last week, the company warned that the three months could bring “sweltering heat, severe weather, intense wildfires and the start of a dynamic hurricane season” — an echo of last summer, which was the hottest on record. In some places, like coastal cities along the Gulf Coast, those hazards could combine into dangerous “compound disasters,” with heat waves and hurricanes arriving back to back.
The Trump administration’s cost-cutting crusade could make this summer’s weather all the more perilous. Mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have hurricane forecasters worried that they’ll lose access to the data they need to make accurate predictions of where storms will make landfall and at what intensity. And as electricity gets more expensive, and global warming forces households to run their air conditioning more, advocates worry that the loss of federal support for people struggling to pay their electric bills could leave a swath of the population especially vulnerable.
Trump’s proposed 2026 budget, unveiled last week, would cancel the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides $4 billion a year to help people pay electricity bills, said Alison Coffey, senior policy analyst at the Boston-based nonprofit Initiative for Energy Justice. “We are about to experience one of the hottest summers on record,” Coffey said. “And this is happening at a time when U.S. households are really, really struggling to pay their utility bills.”
AccuWeather’s summer forecast isn’t the kind you get for your local weather, so they can’t tell you if it will be raining in your town on the Fourth of July. Instead, this seasonal forecast looks at weather trends in March and April, as well as larger phenomena like La Niña and El Niño, the two bands of warm or cold water in the Pacific Ocean that influence the atmosphere above the western U.S. AccuWeather compares all that to how those spring and summer months looked in previous years to get an idea of what might unfold this time around.
AccuWeather says that temperatures could run higher than average across the vast majority of the country this summer. Its forecast also warns of warmer nights, especially in the Eastern U.S. These make heat waves all the more unbearable, as the human body can’t get the respite of a cool night to bring down the physiological stress.
The Eastern U.S. could also suffer through heat waves punctuated by thunderstorms that load the atmosphere with humidity. Those conditions make the human body less efficient at sweating, raising the risk of heat-related illnesses and deaths. Heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other natural disaster, in part because it can aggravate existing conditions like heart disease and asthma.
Out West, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon could see temperatures 3 degrees Fahrenheit, or more, higher than average. “The daytime highs are a bigger issue, [records] that could be challenged or broken in parts of the Northern Rockies and in the Northwest coming up this summer,” said Paul Pastelok, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.
High temperatures are going to increase wildfire risk, Pastelok added, because a dry, heat-baked landscape is a flammable landscape. Right now almost 40 percent of the U.S. is under drought conditions, double the area of last year. Some parts of the American West actually had a fairly wet winter, but that can also cause problems because strong growing plants and trees can turn into fuel in the extra-hot summer heat. And as the season wears on, the landscape gets drier, so it’s more liable to burn catastrophically.
Day after day of relentless heat, especially if it’s humid out too, forces people to run the AC more to stay healthy. For the rich, that’s no problem. But lower-income folks suffer a high “energy burden,” meaning a $200 monthly utility bill is a much larger proportion of their income. Americans are also wrestling with an escalating cost-of-living crisis as rent and inflation march higher. With one in six American households now behind on their utility bills, according to the Initiative for Energy Justice, and 3 million of them having their power shut off each year, the danger is losing power during a heat wave this summer.
City-dwellers face added risk here because of the urban heat island effect, the way sidewalks, parking lots, and buildings trap heat and make cities much hotter than surrounding rural areas. Lower-income neighborhoods get 15 or 20 degrees hotter than richer neighborhoods because they have fewer trees, which provide shade and cooling, according to Vivek Shandas, a climate adaptation scientist at Portland State University. “Those neighborhoods, and the residents living in them, just bear the brunt of that heat wave a lot more acutely than someone living in a more highly invested neighborhood, where tree canopy is lush.”
It will take a whole lot longer to fix the systemic issues that drive heat disparities in cities. But in the meantime, access to air conditioning will be increasingly crucial as the planet warms. “Having financial assistance for low-income households to make sure that they can keep their electricity and their cooling on during the sweltering summer is more crucial than ever,” Coffey said.
