(CAPITOL CITY NOW) – It’s not your imagination: summers are hotter, and winters are colder.

Rabin Bhattarai, an agricultural and biological engineering professor at the University of Illinois, has studied Midwest weather trends the past few decades.

“There are many factors that go into the social vulnerability index, the measure that we used,” Bhattarai said. “These include income, disability, unemployment, language barriers, housing type and minority status. The idea is that even within a county, even within a city, we see people with very different economic backgrounds, very different living conditions. And if an extreme event occurs, not all people will be affected in the same manner.”

He says the hotter weather has hit places such as St Louis, Chicago, and southern Michigan, as opposed to northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Click here for the report.