Southern Cities Experiencing the Worst Heat Waves Right Now

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The unrelenting, record-breaking heat wave gripping much of the U.S. since the beginning of July is not abating. As of Monday, over 146 million Americans were under heat alert, according to Heat.gov . While the heat wave might ease in some areas of the country, it will continue at high intensity to scorch the West for a third week .

So far, the heat wave has been tied to at least 30 fatalities in the West. It blistered through much of the U.S. over the last week -- in the West, parts of the South, Southeast, mid-Atlantic, and southern New England. According to a recent advisory from the National Weather Service , while some parts of the country will start experiencing damp and cooler weather, triple-digit heat is forecast to persist in the interior Pacific Northwest, the Desert Southwest, and the southern Plains.

To determine the southern cities experiencing the worst heat waves right now, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed county-level data on daily average temperature from the NOAA’s nClimGrid-Daily program. County seats were ranked based on the raw differential in average daily temperature from the period July 1-6, 1981-2010 to July-16, 2024. Only county seats with at least 10,000 residents were considered. Data on population is from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey .

It is important to emphasize that our list aims to find how much hotter it is in certain cities compared to their normal temperatures, so it considers the deviation from normal temperatures -- how much hotter current temperatures are compared to historic normals (rather than how high the temperatures are). Also, the list only considers the week of 1-6 July, and some records have been broken since.

The 50 cities on the list are in six states: 31 are in Georgia, seven are in Texas, five in Arizona, three each in Oklahoma and Alabama, and one in Louisiana. (While these cities are all on the East Coast, see nationwide the Cities Experiencing The Worst Heat Waves Right Now .)

The range of deviation from historic normal temperature among the 50 cities is 4.6 degrees (in Durant, Oklahoma) to 6.7 degrees (in Yuma, Arizona). While this list is not necessarily about the hottest temperatures reached, all but one of the cities on the list averaged temperatures in the 80s, including three where temperatures were over 90 degrees Fahrenheit the first week of July. In Yuma, not only was the deviation the largest, but the average temperature was the hottest at 97.5 degrees.

The largest city on the list is Phoenix, which had the second highest deviation from temperature normals. Over 1.6 million Americans in the city sweated under 96.3 degrees, or 6.1 hotter than normal. Following Phoenix, another Arizona city, Tucson, abnormally high temperatures affected the most people, at about half a million in the city proper. Atlanta, too, experienced much hotter weather than normal

Climate change is worsening all kinds of extreme weather globally, but much of it is related to heat — as heat fuels other types of extreme weather. Scientists’ analysis found that certain extreme heat waves last year indeed could not have been possible without climate change. Add to that the fact that extreme heat is the deadliest form of weather globally, and population exposure to extreme heat is increasing. One way to understand how climate change is affecting us is by looking at the deviation of temperatures from normal historic temperatures.

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