I've written some papers on heat waves and temperature variance that are available here, here, and here. I've also worked on projections of how climate change will impact how often various Heat Index thresholds are exceeded as the world warms.

I am also interested in relative humidity variations, particularly the apparent moistening of the Indian subcontinent over the past 50 or so years. This is important for human heat stress, which is something I've written about in the past.

Several big questions remain about these events:

• Are the recent "record-shattering" events evidence that summertime temperature variance is increasing? Is something more than a shifting temperature distribution going on?
• What's the relationship between summertime mean and maximum temperatures? Can we use simple models to understand the observed relation between the two?
• What's the role of thermal advection in heat waves?