Henderson County Schools will be closed Friday for a traditional snow day. This snow day will be made up on Friday, March 13. Childcare will be open at East Heights, Bend Gate, and Thelma B. Johnson Early Learning Center for those enrolled.

Union County Public Schools will be using an NTI day on Friday. Apples Childcare will be open from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., using the front office only.

City, County and State Facilities:

Trash collection will operate one day behind schedule for the remainder of the week for Henderson residents.

 The Henderson County Recycling Center will be closed until further notice. This includes any business recycling.

Other:

Henderson Christian Community Outreach will be closed Friday.

The Gathering Place will be closed Friday. There will be no home delivered meals or services at the Center. Homebound clients may utilize emergency and frozen meals that provided to them, as needed.

What’s called an annular solar eclipse — better known as a ring of fire — will briefly dim the skies over parts of the western U.S. and Central and South America.

As the moon lines up precisely between Earth and the sun, it will blot out all but the sun’s outer rim. A bright, blazing border will appear around the moon for as much as five minutes, wowing skygazers along a narrow path stretching from Oregon to Brazil.

Here’s what you need to know about the ring of fire eclipse, where you can see it and how to protect your eyes:

WHAT’S THE PATH OF THE RING OF FIRE ECLIPSE?

The eclipse will carve out a swath about 130 miles (210 kilometers) wide, starting in the North Pacific and entering the U.S. over Oregon around 8 a.m. PDT Saturday. It will culminate in the ring of fire a little over an hour later. From Oregon, the eclipse will head downward across Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas, encompassing slivers of Idaho, California, Arizona and Colorado, before exiting into the Gulf of Mexico at Corpus Christi. It will take less than an hour for the flaming halo to traverse the U.S.

The entire eclipse — from the moment the moon starts to obscure the sun until it’s back to normal — will last 2 1/2 to three hours at any given spot. The ring of fire portion lasts from three to five minutes, depending on location.

WHERE CAN THE ECLIPSE BE SEEN?

In the U.S. alone, more than 6.5 million people live along the so-called path of annularity, with another 68 million within 200 miles (322 kilometers), according to NASA’s Alex Lockwood, a planetary scientist. “So a few hours’ short drive and you can have over 70 million witness this incredible celestial alignment,” she said.

At the same time, a crescent-shaped partial eclipse will be visible in every U.S. state, although just barely in Hawaii, provided the skies are clear. Canada, Central America and most of South America, also will see a partial eclipse. The closer to the ring of fire path, the bigger the bite the moon will appear to take out of the sun.

HOW TO PROTECT YOUR EYES DURING THE ECLIPSE

Be sure to use safe, certified solar eclipse glasses, Lockwood stressed. Sunglasses aren’t enough to prevent eye damage. Proper protection is needed throughout the eclipse, from the initial partial phase to the ring of fire to the final partial phase.

There are other options if you don’t have eclipse glasses. You can look indirectly with a pinhole projector that you can make yourself, including one made with a cereal box.

Cameras — including those on cellphones — binoculars, or telescopes need special solar filters mounted at the front end.

SEEING DOUBLE

One patch of Texas near San Antonio will be in the cross-hairs of Saturday’s eclipse and next April’s, with Kerrville near the center. It’s one of the locations hosting NASA’s livestream.

“Is the city of Kerrville excited? Absolutely!!!” Mayor Judy Eychner said in an email. “And having NASA here is just icing on the cake!!!”

With Saturday’s eclipse coinciding with art, music and river festivals, Eychner expects Kerrville’s population of 25,000 to double or even quadruple.

WHERE’S THE TOTAL ECLIPSE IN APRIL?

April’s total solar eclipse will crisscross the U.S. in the opposite direction. It will begin in the Pacific and head up through Mexico into Texas, then pass over Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, the northern fringes of Pennsylvania and New York, and New England, before cutting across Canada into the North Atlantic at New Brunswick and Newfoundland. Almost all these places missed out during the United States’ coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in 2017.

It will be 2039 before another ring of fire is visible in the U.S., and Alaska will be the only state then in the path of totality. And it will be 2046 before another ring of fire crosses into the U.S. Lower 48. That doesn’t mean they won’t be happening elsewhere: The southernmost tip of South America will get one next October, and Antarctica in 2026.

GOING AFTER THE SCIENCE

NASA and others plan a slew of observations during both eclipses, with rockets and hundreds of balloons soaring.

“It’s going to be absolutely breathtaking for science,” said NASA astrophysicist Madhulika Guhathakurta.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Aroh Barjatya will help launch three NASA-funded sounding rockets from New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range before, during and after Saturday’s eclipse. The goal is to see how eclipses set off atmospheric waves in the ionosphere nearly 200 miles (320 kilometers) up that could disrupt communications.

Barjatya will be just outside Saturday’s ring of fire. And he’ll miss April’s full eclipse, while launching rockets from Virginia’s Wallops Island.

“But the bittersweet moment of not seeing annularity or totality will certainly be made up by the science return,” he said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Monday that there have been 23 weather extreme events in America that cost at least $1 billion this year through August, eclipsing the year-long record total of 22 set in 2020. So far this year’s disasters have cost more than $57.6 billion and claimed at least 253 lives.

And NOAA’s count doesn’t yet include Tropical Storm Hilary’s damages in hitting California and a deep drought that has struck the South and Midwest because those costs are still to be totaled, said Adam Smith, the NOAA applied climatologist and economist who tracks the billion-dollar disasters.

“We’re seeing the fingerprints of climate change all over our nation,” Smith said in an interview Monday. “I would not expect things to slow down anytime soon.”

NOAA has been tracking billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States since 1980 and adjusts damage costs for inflation. What’s happening reflects a rise in the number of disasters and more areas being built in risk-prone locations, Smith said.

“Exposure plus vulnerability plus climate change is supercharging more of these into billion-dollar disasters,” Smith said.

NOAA added eight new billion-dollar disasters to the list since its last update a month ago. In addition to Idalia and the Hawaiian firestorm that killed at least 115 people, NOAA newly listed an Aug. 11 Minnesota hailstorm; severe storms in the Northeast in early August; severe storms in Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin in late July; mid-July hail and severe storms in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia; deadly flooding in the Northeast and Pennsylvania in the second week of July; and a late June outbreak of severe storms in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

“This year a lot of the action has been across the center states, north central, south and southeastern states,” Smith said.

Experts say the United States has to do more to adapt to increased disasters because they will only get worse.

“The climate has already changed and neither the built environment nor the response systems are keeping up with the change,” said former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Craig Fugate, who wasn’t part of the NOAA report.

The increase in weather disasters is consistent with what climate scientists have long been saying, along with a possible boost from a natural El Nino, University of Arizona climate scientist Katharine Jacobs said.

“Adding more energy to the atmosphere and the oceans will increase intensity and frequency of extreme events,” said Jacobs, who was not part of the NOAA report. “Many of this year’s events are very unusual and in some cases unprecedented.”

Smith said he thought the 2020 record would last for a long time because the 20 billion-dollar disasters that year smashed the old record of 16.

It didn’t, and now he no longer believes new records will last long.

Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field called the trend in billion-dollar disasters “very troubling.”

“But there are things we can do to reverse the trend,” Field said. “If we want to reduce the damages from severe weather, we need to accelerate progress on both stopping climate change and building resilience.”

Emperor penguins hatch their eggs and raise their chicks on the ice that forms around the continent each Antarctic winter and melts in the summer months.

Researchers used satellite imagery to look at breeding colonies in a region near Antarctica’s Bellingshausen Sea. The images showed no ice was left there in December during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, as had occurred in 2021.

“If the sea ice breaks up under them, the young chicks will drown or freeze to death,” said Peter Fretwell, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey and co-author of the study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Fretwell’s team has also completed a preliminary analysis of known nesting sites — visible in satellite photos because of colored guano, or poop stains, left on white ice — across Antarctica, the only continent where the emperor penguin lives. There are about 300,000 breeding pairs left of the world’s largest penguins.

“That this could happen doesn’t shock me, but I’m shocked that it has happened already. I thought it would be further down the line,” said Daniel Zitterbart, a researcher who studies Antarctica for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, but was not involved in the new paper.

If penguins aren’t successful breeding in one location, they may look for another site the next year, he said. While it’s possible for the population to recover from one or two bad breeding years, he’s worried about the future.

“If you look further out down the line, how many suitable places will be left?” he asked.

More than 6.5 billion people, or 81% of the world’s population, sweated through at least one day where climate change had a significant effect on the average daily temperature, according to a new report issued Wednesday by Climate Central, a science nonprofit that has figured a way to calculate how much climate change has affected daily weather.

“We really are experiencing climate change just about everywhere,” said Climate Central Vice President for Science Andrew Pershing.

For 2 billion people, in a mostly tropical belt across the globe, climate change made it three times more likely to be hotter every single day of July. Those include the million-person cities of Mecca, Saudi Arabia and San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The day with the most widespread climate-change effect was July 10, when 3.5 billion people experienced extreme heat that had global warming’s fingerprints, according to the report. That’s different than the hottest day globally, which was July 7, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer.

The study is not peer-reviewed, the gold standard for science, because the month just ended. It is based on peer-reviewed climate fingerprinting methods that are used by other groups and are considered technically valid by the National Academy of Sciences. Two outside climate scientists told The Associated Press that they found the study to be credible.

More than a year ago Climate Central developed a measurement tool called the Climate Shift Index. It calculates the effect, if any, of climate change on temperatures across the globe in real time, using European and U.S. forecasts, observations and computer simulations. To find if there is an effect, the scientists compare recorded temperatures to a simulated world with no warming from climate change and it’s about 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) cooler to find out the chances that the heat was natural.

“By now, we should all be used to individual heat waves being connected to global warming,” said Princeton University climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi, who wasn’t part of the study. “Unfortunately, this month, as this study elegantly shows, has given the vast majority of people on this planet a taste of global warming’s impact on extreme heat.”

In the United States, 22 U.S. cities had at least 20 days when climate change tripled the likelihood of extra heat, including Miami, Houston, Phoenix, Tampa, Las Vegas and Austin.

The U.S. city most affected by climate change in July was Cape Coral, Florida, which saw fossil fuels make hotter temperatures 4.6 times more likely for the month and had 29 out of 31 days where there was a significant climate change fingerprint.

Pedestrians cover themselves as they pass through Times Square while temperatures rise, July 27, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

The farther north in the United States, the less of a climate effect was seen in July. Researchers found no significant effect in places like North Dakota and South Dakota, Wyoming, northern California, upstate New York and parts of Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Heat waves in the U.S. Southwest, the Mediterranean and even China have gotten special analysis by World Weather Attribution finding a climate change signal, but places like the Caribbean and Middle East are having huge climate change signals and not getting the attention, Pershing said. Unlike the other study, this one looked at the entire globe.

Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona and home to Phoenix, reported that its health department has confirmed 25 heat-associated deaths this year as of Saturday since the first one was recorded in April, with 249 more under investigation.

That’s seven more heat-associated deaths for the year since 18 were reported as of July 15, when there were 69 additional deaths under investigation.

As of the same time last year, there were 38 heat-associated deaths and 256 more listed as under investigation.

The region’s county and city governments, hospitals, schools and nonprofit groups that operate several hundred cooling and hydrating stations across the area are closely watching the confirmed death figures, along with daily forecasts from the National Weather Service.

Phoenix hit 27 consecutive days above 110 F (43 C) on Wednesday. There has not been a single overnight low under 90 F (32.2 C) since July 9, which means people’s bodies aren’t adequately recovering after the sun goes down, making them susceptible to heat illnesses that can result in death.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE HEAT-ASSOCIATED DEATHS?

Cases listed as under investigation are deaths in which the county’s Office of the Medical Examiner suspects that heat played a role.

WHAT DO THE NEW NUMBERS MEAN?

While the numbers confirm that people are continuing to die in Maricopa County from causes associated with the heat, it’s hard to draw firm conclusions.

“My advice would be it’s a little early to really interpret the mortality data from the county,” he said.

Sonia Singh, supervisor with the Maricopa County Public Health Department’s communications office, said the update means only “that seven additional deaths were confirmed in that time frame, not necessarily that they occurred in that time frame.”

“We will likely not have a complete count of deaths resulting from this heat wave for some time,” Singh said in a written statement. “This is for a couple reasons: 1) the deaths are reported from multiple sources and may not come in to Public Health right away, and 2) these deaths sometimes take a while to go from a suspect case to a confirmed case.”

For instance, toxicological tests that can takes weeks or months after an autopsy is conducted could eventually result in many deaths listed as under investigation being changed to confirmed.

At the end of last year, Maricopa County had reported there were 378 heat-associated deaths confirmed for all of 2022. By this spring, that number had grown to 425, the current number, as more deaths that were under investigation were confirmed as heat-associated. More than half of the deaths occurred in July in what was the hottest summer on record — a record that is likely to be broken this year.

WHO HAS BEEN DYING IN THE HEAT?

Both this year and last, about 80% of the people who died fell ill when they were outdoors, and more than a third were people experiencing homelessness. Over half of all heat-associated deaths involved drug use.

The death of a 72-year-old woman in metro Phoenix five years ago when her electricity was turned off over a $51 debt forced utilities to change their rules.

WHAT ROLE DOES THE URBAN HEAT ISLAND EFFECT PLAY IN PHOENIX?

An analysis published Wednesday says Phoenix would be consistently 7 F (3.9 C) cooler, every day and night, if not for the heat created by the city’s built environment, also known as the heat island effect.

The phenomenon makes every city hotter. In Phoenix, it pushes temperatures to extremes, said Jen Brady, research manager with Climate Central and one of the analysis’ authors.

“Some cities have a lot less to play with before people are at very high risk for health impacts,” Brady said.

About 17,000 residents live in areas of Phoenix where the urban surroundings add at least 10 F (5.6 C) to what they would experience otherwise.

WHAT’S HAPPEPNING IN OTHER PARTS OF ARIZONA?

Other parts of Arizona, especially the southern Yuma, Pima and Santa Cruz counties, are also seeing dangerous, record high weather that has resulted in deaths, but only Maricopa County releases a weekly online update on heat-associated deaths.

The Yuma County Sheriff’s Office said farmworker Dario Mendoza, 26, died after collapsing in the fields July 20 after the high reached 116 F (46.7 C) in the agricultural region. The Yuma County medical examiner said the death was heat-related, a sheriff’s spokesperson said.

The Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health is investigating.

The Tucson sector of the U.S. Border Patrol reported that during the first three weeks of July it had received 151 calls for help and rescued more than 1,100 migrants in the sweltering desert near the U.S.-Mexico border. Agents have also encountered human remains.

“Arizona’s west desert is the most dangerous place to cross the southwest border, and this intense heat only increases the chances for tragedy,” said Joel D. Garcia, patrol agent in charge of the Ajo Station.

Brown also set a goal for the state to get half its energy from renewable sources, with climate change bearing down.

Yet when Jordan Harris and Robin Raj went knocking on doors with an idea that addresses both water loss and climate pollution — installing solar panels over irrigation canals — they couldn’t get anyone to commit.

Fast forward eight years. With devastating heat, record-breaking wildfire, looming crisis on the Colorado River, a growing commitment to fighting climate change, and a little bit of movement-building, their company Solar AquaGrid is preparing to break ground on the first solar-covered canal project in the United States.

“All of these coming together at this moment,” Harris said. “Is there a more pressing issue that we could apply our time to?”

The idea is simple: install solar panels over canals in sunny, water-scarce regions where they reduce evaporation and make electricity.

A study by the University of California, Merced gives a boost to the idea, estimating that 63 billion gallons of water could be saved by covering California’s 4,000 miles of canals with solar panels that could also generate 13 gigawatts of power. That’s enough for the entire city of Los Angeles from January through early October.

But that’s an estimate — neither it, nor other potential benefits have been tested scientifically. That’s about to change with Project Nexus in California’s Central Valley.

BUILDING MOMENTUM

Solar on canals has long been discussed as a two-for-one solution in California, where affordable land for energy development is as scarce as water. But the grand idea was still a hypothetical.

Harris, a former record label executive, co-founded “Rock the Vote,” the voter registration push in the early 1990s, and Raj organized socially responsible and sustainability campaigns for businesses. They knew that people needed a nudge – ideally one from a trusted source.

They thought research from a reputable institution might do the trick, and got funding for UC Merced to study the impact of solar-covered-canals in California.

The study’s results have taken off.

They reached Governor Gavin Newsom, who called Wade Crowfoot, his secretary of natural resources.

“Let’s get this in the ground and see what’s possible,” Crowfoot recalled the governor saying.

Around the same time, the Turlock Irrigation District, an entity that also provides power, reached out to UC Merced. It was looking to build a solar project to comply with the state’s increased goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045. But land was very expensive. So building atop existing infrastructure was appealing. Then there was the prospect that shade from panels might reduce weeds growing in the canals — a problem that costs this utility $1 million annually.

“Until this UC Merced paper came out, we never really saw what those co-benefits would be,” said Josh Weimer, external affairs manager for the district. “If somebody was going to pilot this concept, we wanted to make sure it was us.”

Then the state committed $20 million in public funds, turning the pilot into a three-party collaboration among the private, public and academic sectors. About 1.6 miles (2.6 kilometers) of canals between 20 and 110 feet wide will be covered with solar panels between five and 15 feet off the ground.

The UC Merced team will study impacts ranging from evaporation to water quality, said Brandi McKuin, lead researcher on the study.

“We need to get to the heart of those questions before we make any recommendations about how to do this more widely,” she said.

LESSONS LEARNED ABROAD

California isn’t first with this technology. India pioneered it on one of the largest irrigation projects in the world. The Sardar Sarovar dam and canal project brings water to hundreds of thousands of villages in the dry, arid regions of western India’s Gujarat state.

Then-chief minister of Gujarat state, Narendra Modi, now the country’s prime minister, inaugurated it in 2012 with much fanfare. Sun Edison, the engineering firm, promised 19,000 km (11,800 miles) of solar canals. But only a handful of smaller projects have gone up since. The firm filed for bankruptcy.

“The capital costs are really high, and maintenance is an issue,” said Jaydip Parmar an engineer in Gujarat who oversees several small solar canal projects.

With ample arid land, ground-based solar makes more sense there economically, he said.

Clunky design is another reason the technology hasn’t been widely adopted in India. The panels in Gujarat’s pilot project sit directly over the canal, limiting access for maintenance and emergency crews.

Back in California, Harris took note of India’s experience, and began a search for a better solution. The project there will use better materials.

NEXT STEPS

Project Nexus may not be alone for long. The Gila River Indian Tribe received funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Act to install solar on their canals in an effort to save water to ease stress on the Colorado River. And one of Arizona’s largest water and power utilities, the Salt River Project, is studying the technology alongside Arizona State University.

Still, rapid change isn’t exactly embraced in the world of water infrastructure, said Representative Jared Huffman, D-Calif.

“It’s an ossified bastion of stodgy old engineers,” he said.

Huffman has been talking up the technology for almost a decade, and said he finds folks are still far more interested in building taller dams than what he says is a much more sensible idea.

He pushed a $25 million provision through last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to fund a pilot project for the Bureau of Reclamation. Project sites for that one are currently being evaluated.

And a group of more than 100 climate advocacy groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace, have now sent a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Bureau Commissioner Camille Touton urging them “to accelerate the widespread deployment of solar photovoltaic energy systems” above the Bureau’s canals and aqueducts. Covering all 8,000 miles of Bureau-owned canals and aqueducts could “generate over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy — enough to power nearly 20 million homes — and reduce water evaporation by tens of billions of gallons.”

Covering every canal would be ideal, Huffman said, but starting with the California Aqueduct and the Delta Mendota canal, “it’s a really compelling case,” he said. “And it’s about time that we started doing this.”

Minor to moderate flooding will continue along many area rivers through Sunday. There are flood warning in effect as a result of recent heavy rainfall.

This includes the Ohio River at Newburgh Dam, which affects Henderson, Daviess, Vanderburgh, Warrick, and Spencer counties.

The Ohio River at Mount Vernon, which affects Henderson, Union, Vanderburgh and Posey counties.

The Ohio River at Shawneetown, which affects Union, Hardin, Crittenden, and Gallatin counties.

The Ohio River at J.T. Myers Dam, which affects Union and Posey Counties.

The Ohio River is expected to rise about flood stage at several locations during the first half of the week. For the Ohio River, including Newburgh Dam, Mount Vernon, J.T. Myers Dam, and Shawneetown – minor flooding is forecast.

The flood warning remains in effect from Tuesday morning until Saturday afternoon for the Ohio River at Mount Vernon. As of 6 a.m. Monday, the stage was 33.8 feet. The river is expected to rise above flood stage late Tuesday morning to a crest of 36.5 feet Thursday evening. It will then fall below flood stage late Saturday morning. The flood stage is 35 feet.

The Ohio River at Newburgh Dam was 38.4 feet as of 9 a.m. Monday morning. The National Weather Service expects the maximum river stage within the next 24 hours. The river is expected to rise to a crest of 40.7 feet early Thursday morning. It will then fall below flood stage – which is 38 feet – Thursday morning.

Widespread showers and thunderstorms return to the forecast Friday and Friday night. A few strong or severe thunderstorms cannot be ruled out Friday afternoon and Friday night along with heavy rain.

There is a marginal risk of severe storms tonight. Damaging winds, large hail, and isolated tornadoes are the main severe hazards.

Heavy rain is expected tonight. With rainfall totals of 2 to 3 inches forecast. Localized higher amounts exceeding four inches are possible.

A flood watch is in effect this evening through Friday morning. Excessive runoff may result in the flooding of rivers, creeks, streams, and other low-lying and flood-prone locations. Low-water crossings may be flooded.

Strong and gusty winds are forecast late tonight. Sustained winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts up to 50 mph are expected. A few storm-aided wind gusts to 60 mph are possible.

A Wind Advisory has been issued for 6 a.m. Friday until 9 p.m. Friday.

Gusty winds could blow around unsecured objects. Tree limbs could be blown down and a few power outages may result. Some trees could come down as well.

Use extra caution when driving, especially when operating high-profile vehicles. Secure outdoor objects.

There is a marginal risk of severe storms into Friday morning.  Damaging winds, large hail, and isolated tornadoes are the main severe hazards. Heavy rain is expected Friday morning.

There is a chance of thunderstorms late today through tonight. Some
of the storms may become strong or briefly severe, especially across
the Evansville Tri State region. Hail and strong winds are most
likely.