NEW YORK (AP) — An intense and nearly historic weather pattern is cooking much of America under a dangerous heat dome this week with triple-digit temperatures in places that haven't been so hot in more than a decade.
The heat wave is especially threatening because it's hitting cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia early in the summer when people haven't gotten their bodies adapted to the broiling conditions, several meteorologists said. The dome of high pressure that's parking over the eastern United States is trapping hot air from the Southwest that already made an uncomfortable stop in the Midwest.
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Felix Gutierrez, 43, and Caesar Ayala Gutierrez, 21, pick blueberries in the sweltering heat at Stepping Stone Farms on Monday, June 23, 2025, in Bourbon County, Ky. (AP Photo/Michael Swensen)
Poeple walk across the Big Four Bridge as the sun sets at Waterfront Park on Sunday, June 22, 2025, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Jon Cherry)
Beach goers crowd a public beach on the Lake Michigan shore, Sunday, June 22, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)
A child covers his face while a stream of water pours down at Waterfront Park on Sunday, June 22, 2025, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Jon Cherry)
Skateboarders Anthony Eadens and Tommy Wright catch their breath after skating at the Dave Armstrong Extreme Park on Sunday, June 22, 2025, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Jon Cherry)
Travis Law uses a portable fan as he tries to stay cool in Busch Stadium before the start of a baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds Saturday, June 21, 2025, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
A key measurement of the strength of the high pressure broke a record Monday and was the third-highest reading for any date, making for a “near historic” heat wave, said private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist. The worst of the heat was likely to peak for Northeastern cities on Tuesday, forecasters said.
“Like an air fryer, it’s going to be hot," Maue said. ”This is a three-day stretch of dangerous heat that will test the mettle of city dwellers who are most vulnerable to oppressive heat waves.”
A heat dome occurs when a large area of high pressure in the upper atmosphere acts as a reservoir, trapping heat and humidity. A heat wave is the persistence of heat, usually three days or more, with unusually hot temperatures.
Nearly three-quarters of the country's population — 245 million people — will swelter with 90 degrees Fahrenheit (about 32 Celsius) or higher temperatures on Monday, and 33 million people, almost 10% of the country, will feel blistering 100-degree heat (about 38 Celsius) on Tuesday, Maue said. The government's heat health website showed the highest level of heat risk in swaths from Chicago to Pittsburgh and North Carolina to New York.
Those triple-digit air temperatures — with the feels-like index even worse because of humidity — are possible in places where it’s unusual. New York hasn’t seen 100 degrees since 2011 and Philadelphia, which is forecast to have consecutive triple-digit days, hasn’t reached that mark since 2012, said Climate Central chief meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky.
In downtown Baltimore, temperatures climbed into the high 90s by early Monday afternoon, bringing dozens of people to cool off at St. Vincent de Paul's resource center. A few blocks away, the city's historic Broadway Market food hall closed early when the building's air conditioning broke.
The heat forced the cancellation of events in west Baltimore, said Eric Davis Sr., who spends most of his days working at a baseball field there.
“You can’t have kids getting heat stroke,” he said. “It’s just too hot today.“
NOAA meteorologist David Roth said it takes time to acclimate to summer heat and this heat dome could be a shock for some.
“You’re talking about some places that could be 40 degrees warmer than last week. So that’s a big deal,” he said.
The heat is part of Earth's long-term warming. Summers in the United States are 2.4 degrees (1.3 degrees Celsius) hotter than 50 years ago, according to NOAA data. Human-caused climate change has made this heat wave three times more likely than without the burning of coal, oil and gas, the climate science nonprofit Climate Central calculated, using computer simulations comparing the current weather to a fictional world without the industrial greenhouse gases.
A key question is how much humidity will add to the discomfort and danger of the heat.
Maue is forecasting dry air which may be a degree or two or three hotter than predicted by NOAA, but more comfortable. Other meteorologists expected worse: Sticky, humid and even more dangerous.
"The ‘big deal' will be with the humidity being provided with the wet late spring conditions," said University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado. “The area of high pressure will allow for a lot of evaporation to occur from the wet grounds locally and regionally, which will increase the heat indices quite a bit.”
Woods Placky said to expect dew points, a key measure of humidity, in the 70s. That's downright tropical, with some places approaching a dew point of 80 — a level Woods Placky said feels like “you’re in a swimming pool” and “the atmosphere is absorbing you.”
If this heat were later in the summer, it might not be as dangerous because the human body can adjust to the seasonably warmer temperatures, but this one is coming within days of the solstice, Woods Placky and others said.
“It will be a shock to the system,” she said.
Associated Press writers Isabella O'Malley in Philadelphia and Lea Skene in Baltimore contributed.
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Felix Gutierrez, 43, and Caesar Ayala Gutierrez, 21, pick blueberries in the sweltering heat at Stepping Stone Farms on Monday, June 23, 2025, in Bourbon County, Ky. (AP Photo/Michael Swensen)
Poeple walk across the Big Four Bridge as the sun sets at Waterfront Park on Sunday, June 22, 2025, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Jon Cherry)
Beach goers crowd a public beach on the Lake Michigan shore, Sunday, June 22, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)
A child covers his face while a stream of water pours down at Waterfront Park on Sunday, June 22, 2025, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Jon Cherry)
Skateboarders Anthony Eadens and Tommy Wright catch their breath after skating at the Dave Armstrong Extreme Park on Sunday, June 22, 2025, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Jon Cherry)
Travis Law uses a portable fan as he tries to stay cool in Busch Stadium before the start of a baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds Saturday, June 21, 2025, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
