It’s been a hot, dry summer across much of the Rocky Mountains, and a heat wave in the forecast could make things even hotter.
Forecasters are currently predicting a high pressure system that will hang over the region for about seven to ten days, beginning this weekend and into next week. Meteorologists call this phenomenon a “heat dome,” because the hot, stagnant air from high pressure systems just sits over landscapes under the metaphorical lid of the atmosphere.
High temperatures could be ten to fifteen degrees above normal, and may break records. Those who are more susceptible to heat-related illnesses, along with people without access to reliable water systems are likely to be disproportionately impacted.
Daniel Swain, a weather and climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and the National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said the heat wave could be a mixed bag for the very active fire conditions.
“On the one hand, it'll make things even drier,” he said. “It'll make things even more flammable and give us even greater propensity for any ignition to immediately become a more significant conflagration. But on the plus side, we will probably have less wind than we've had recently.”
He said this heat dome is notable due to both its broad geographic reach, and its intensity.
“Will we break temperature records on the Western Slope or in Denver along the Front Range? We might, that's not guaranteed,” he said. “It's still a little bit uncertain, but it's certainly within the realm of possibility. And that's notable because we've broken a lot of records in terms of temperatures in recent years.”
Records for heat were broken across the Upper Colorado River Basin this spring. Another heat dome created by a high pressure system made March the warmest on record for Colorado, Utah, and most of Wyoming. Some weather stations recorded March temperatures in the 80s and 90s—long before the first 80 and 90 degree days usually happen in our region.
“We know that all of these things are intensifying in a warming climate,” Swain said. “Is this highly anomalous? Is this just something that the natural world can throw at us when we get unlucky? The answer is yes, it is. There's always a component of random variability and natural climate changes underpinning any particular extreme event. But also in cases like these, there is a clear climate change fingerprint as well.”
How are rural communities addressing extreme heat?
With climate change’s fingerprints on intensifying heat events, and the region’s overall climate trending warmer, many jurisdictions are making long-term plans for how to prepare their communities for the heat when it arrives.
Last year, nonprofit thinktank Federation of American Scientists put together a policy agenda centered around extreme heat and the public health risks, with its policy recommendations aimed at the federal government and regulators.
“There was a lot of upheaval, change, transition, which has made a lot of the recommendations that we made at the federal level quite tricky to implement,” said Grace Wickerson, FAS’s senior manager of climate and health.
As a result, she said FAS spent the past year creating another policy agenda, this one directed at ways states can prepare for extreme heat, as well as local communities. The policy recommendations are grouped in four main categories: safe homes, safe workplaces, safe schools and childcare, and safe communities.
Wickerson said part of the work was talking to rural communities and jurisdictions specifically about what their needs were, and how they looked different from big cities. For example, many urban areas rely on cooling centers on hot days.
“Are cooling centers actually a reliable solution in more rural spaces?” she said. “Rather than have someone have to drive 30, 45 minutes to get to some kind of shelter, the focus is can we make it easier for someone's home to be a sheltering site? Can we build more networks of peer to peer support, where people know where to go when it's hot out, (where) they can actually have reliable cooling?”
Wickerson said in developing the heat agenda, FAS spoke with the city of Moab, Utah. Located on the Colorado Plateau and with an economy centered on outdoor recreation, conversations with Moab centered around not just public health, but also economic resilience.
“It's a broader conversation, but they're starting to explore like wintertime activities that they can be using to draw in tourism to try to get folks who may be now scared off by the extreme heat conditions to also come in other seasons,” Wickerson said.
Marguerite Harden, senior resiliency manager at the Colorado Resiliency Office within the Department of Local Affairs, said the CRO has gotten more requests in recent years to provide technical and financial support to Colorado cities and counties with extreme heat.
“Seven of Colorado's top 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2010, and we know that further and significant warming is expected in all parts of Colorado in all seasons over the next several decades, with elevation playing a meaningful role in Colorado's experience of extreme heat,” she said.
Harden said data collected by the CRO shows that some of the state's more rural areas, like the Eastern Plains and the Western Slope are likely to be more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme heat. Part of that is due to the demographics of Colorado's rural areas, which tend to be older; the elderly are vulnerable to heat-related illnesses. These areas also tend to have more people who work outside, especially in agriculture and in the outdoor recreation industry.
“Many of our larger and more urban communities in Colorado have the capacity, funding, and political will to advance their own climate and extreme heat work,” she said. “So a lot of our work here at the Colorado Resiliency Office does focus on those smaller, more capacity-constrained communities, including rural communities.”
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
