Heat, ozone levels to soar

By JEFF MONTGOMERY The News Journal 07/15/2006

Delaware Air Quality program manager Ray Malenfant issued a right-to-the-point heat wave forecast for the next few days late Friday afternoon.

"Not good," Malenfant said in a message to Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control employees.

Upper 90-degree temperatures and stagnant air could begin cooking up troubling levels of smog-forming ozone as early as Sunday across the region, with pollution levels triggering "Code Red" ozone warnings Monday and Tuesday.

"It obviously impacts anybody with asthma or the young and elderly," Malenfant said. "It's a tremendous irritant."

The bad air will likely accompany a weeklong hot spell that one National Weather Service forecaster said could begin Sunday and continue through the week.

Temperatures are expected to climb into the 90s, with humidity and other conditions combining to make the air feel more like 100 degrees and up. Weather officials issued an "excessive heat watch" for New Castle County, with a likely high of 97 on Monday and 95 through Thursday.

"We're concerned about the urbanized areas of the Delaware Valley, because they get hotter than the rural areas," said Mark DeLisi, a meteorologist with the weather service's Mount Holly, N.J., office.

Earlier Friday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the nation chalked up its hottest first half of the year since record-keeping began in 1895.

Temperatures in Delaware ranked seventh-highest over the same period, according to NOAA records. Only torrential rains in June kept the state from marking one of its driest January-to-June periods in more than a century.

On Wilmington's west side, Doretha J. Cuthbertson was watching all of the forecasts anxiously Friday afternoon.

"I hear it's going to be a scorcher," said Cuthbertson, who has diabetes and whose husband has respiratory problems.

Cuthbertson said the heat could prevent her from working with the group Churches Take a Corner on a program that helps supervise children during summertime play and activities at 24th and Tatnall streets.

"I'm praying that it's not going to be too hot," Cuthbertson said.

Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch for the National Climate Data Center, said the nation experienced hotter and drier-than-normal conditions despite the absence of warm "El Nino" ocean temperatures in the western Pacific or any other global-scale weather influences.

"It wasn't unusual that it was warmer than average," Lawrimore cautioned. "We've come to expect it to be warmer than average."

Global climate change, potentially influenced by human activities, could be a part of that trend, Lawrimore said.

Contact Jeff Montgomery at 678-4277 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com