Jack Scheff discusses humidity research in The Washington Post
Research conducted by Jacob (Jack) Scheff, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences, and James Cody Burroughs, who obtained a B.S. and M.S. from UNC Charlotte, was featured in The Washington Post’s article, “Did your area just have its most humid summer yet? Find out here.”
For his M.S. thesis, Burroughs analyzed long-term humidity records to provide a comprehensive assessment of the patterns and trends of summertime dewpoint in the United States from 1948 to 2020. Based on these results, Scheff published Diverging trends in US summer dewpoint since 1948 in the International Journal of Climatology in 2023.
“I would expect that over the next generation or two, high summer dew points like we experienced this summer will become more and more common and will be even higher when they occur, simply because we expect greenhouse gases to keep warming up the air and oceans worldwide, and warmer air can hold more water vapor,” said Scheff.