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We’re gonna return now to the extreme 극심한 heat in this country and take a closer look at how much worse it can be for people living in cities. 80 million Americans live in cities with populations of more than 100,000. And it’s common for the downtown areas of those cities to be 5 degrees hotter than surrounding suburbs <도시의>근교, 교외. Tonight, ABC’s Ned Potter takes us to some of the hottest places in the country.

 

This is how downtown Atlanta looks in a computer animation from NASA. And this is how it looks when you add temperature data. The warmest areas, the buildings and roads, are in red. Scientists talk of modern cities as heat islands with their miles of asphalt and concrete. On a day like today, the cities are 2 to 10 degrees hotter than the countryside around them.

 

Not only do cities bake <구어> 몹시 더워지다 in the sun, they don’t cool off the way countryside does. If New York, for instance, has a high tomorrow of 97, it’ll only drop to 83 overnight. “That’s all that brick and cement road pavement which is retaining 간직하다, 유지하다 the heat and very slow to release it, so it’s very, very tough to stay cool inside the city metropolitan area itself.”

 

The National Weather Services says heat causes more deaths than almost any other kind of weather. More than anything except for the most catastrophic 큰재앙의 hurricanes such as Katrina last year. “Cities that are hotter, because of the heat island, have more air pollution, more smog and that affects people with asthma 천식 and cardiovascular 심장혈관의 disease.”

 

But some of the solutions are simple such as planting more trees or using less black asphalt. A building with a white roof, we’re told, can save 20% to 50% on air conditioning. Ned Potter, ABC News, New York.

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