What is a 'heat dome'?

A heat dome is like a giant blanket that traps hot air over a place for days, and sometimes even weeks.

Imagine you're sitting in your favorite cozy room on a sunny day, and someone closes the windows and turns off the fan. The air gets warmer and warmer because it can’t escape. That’s what a heat dome does, but much bigger! It's like a blanket of high pressure in the sky that keeps the hot air from moving away.

Think of the sky as a big oven. When a heat dome forms, it acts like the lid on that oven, keeping all the heat inside. The sun shines down, heating up the ground, and the warm air rises, but the heat dome stops it from going anywhere. So the hot air just stays there, making everything even hotter.

It’s like wearing a thick wool sweater on a summer day, you can’t sweat, you can’t move, and the air feels heavy, like it's pressing down on your head. That’s how people feel when they’re under a heat dome, super hot, and it doesn’t seem to get any better anytime soon!