How extreme heat affects our national parks
[ad_1]
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Time is fast approaching for summer vacations. For some people, it means a visit to a national park.
More and more people are using their time off to visit our country’s national parks. Numbers from the National Park Service (NPS) show a record 331.9 million visits in 2024. That’s an increase of 6.36 million visits (2%) from 2023 and more than the previous record of 330.9 visits set in 2016.
The week set aside for people to visit our nation’s parks is National Park Week that begins Saturday, April 19. Park entrance fees will be waived. Part of the reason for the free week is to allow people to celebrate and explore the sites that make up the National Park System. Thankfully, April is not as hot for recreation visits as it is during July.
It is possible that some or many of these visits came during the heat of the late spring and summer seasons. With that in mind, the climatologists with Climate Central report that these parks, existing for conservation, preservation, and recreation, may be warming twice as fast as the United States national average.
Recreation visits in 2024 peaked in July, the second hottest month for much of the United States.
Using data from the NPS, climatologists suggest that these parks are likely to see five times extremely hot days in the 25 years when compared to the numbers from 1979 to 2012.
The climate’s warming due to greenhouse gases means that the warming in our national parks also means the dangerous heat causing risks and stresses on the ecosystem, the park’s infrastructure, and, perhaps just as important as the health of visitors, a wildfire risk.
The stress then is placed on park managers to figure out how to adapt their operations to the changing climate. They likely would be huddling with climate experts to see what adjustments they need to make for safety reasons. Could this include a reduction of a park’s hours?
The other stressor, of course, is how the heat affects those who visit. The NPS detail says the visits do increase in the warmer months, but do drop off when the month’s average temperature is higher than 80°F. Smart.
The analysis done by Climate Central yielded a few other conclusions. In the next 25 years, the 25 parks used in this research are likely to experience between six and 22 more extremely hot days per year than the 1979 to 2012 time period.
The largest increase looks to occur at Yosemite National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Where there was an average of four extreme heat days between 1979 and 2012, the forecast is for 26 extreme heat days by 2050.
Six of the 25 have extreme heat thresholds over 100°. They are Arches (Utah), Badlands (South Dakota), Canyonlands (Utah), Grand Canyon (Arizona), Hot Springs (Arkansas) and Joshua Tree (California). This means there will be more days with triple-digit heat.
Adaptation to current and future climate change offers short-term solutions. It is the need to quickly reduce heat-trapping that offers the most impactful way to slow down the rate of heating.
In the final analysis, this increase in warming could signal that the park system will be different for future visitors than what we have today.
[ad_2]
Source link
