Southeast Asia Latest To Have Heat Records Pulverized; Western Canada/NW U.S. Next?

Forecast weather map for this coming Monday depicts
an intense heat wave in southwestern Canada. 

 It seems like every week now we get news of some place on the globe having unprecedented heat. We in Vermont briefly had our turn in April, and I'm sure we will again in the coming weeks or months or years or all of the above.  

For the record, though, no particularly hot weather is in the New England forecast for at least the next two weeks and probably more. 

The latest newsmaker for heat is Southeast Asia, which has been experiencing an incredibly dangerous heat wave.

As the Washington Post reports, Laos established a new all-time high temperature for the nation at 110.3 degrees. That comes just a month after the Laos previous all-time high of 108.9 degrees was established. 

It's a humid heat, too, which makes it all the more dangerous. In one town, the low temperature on one day this week was 89.2 degrees. Laos is a poor nation, and many people don't have adequate access to air conditioning. When it gets this hot, sweating can't cool you down like it can with more modestly hot temperatures.

Experts think they'll see a lot of excess mortality from this in Southeast Asia. 

Vietnam also saw its highest-ever temperature this week, with a reading of 111.4 degrees on Saturday. That record lasted a whole day. It was 111.6 degrees Sunday, notes the Washington Post, quoting extreme temperatures tracker Maximiliano Herrera. 

The extreme heat also spread into Thailand, Cambodia and parts of China. Cambodia set an all time record high of 106.9.

Southeast Asia tends to have its worst heat waves in May, before the onset of the monsoon season. But this heat wave is beyond the pale for Ma Nature.  

Climate change is taking what would be normal, albeit oppressive heat waves, and make them literally unbearable.

WESTERN NORTH AMERICA NEXT?

Back in June, 2021, an unprecedented (there's that word again!) heat dome set up over British Columbia, Canada.  It smashed heat records across that province and the Pacific Northwest of the United States. In Lytton, British Columbia, the temperature reached 121 degrees, the hottest reading ever recorded anywhere in Canada.

Experts said that the intense heat ridge was such a rare event that it could only have happened with climate change. Otherwise it was at least a one in 1,000 year event. 

Fast forward just under two years from deadly heat dome in Canada and another one of similar strength seems ready to set up over western Canada, as meteorologist Jeff Berardelli notes in a series of Tweets. 

It's mid-May, not the end of June, so the temperatures won't go into the 110s this time around. Instead we're talking temperatures well into the 90s.  

This is still very bad, of course. The heat will send melt water from snow rushing down the slopes of the Canadian Rockies, worsening already bad flooding in British Columbia. In low elevations there, wildfires are already breaking out. 

The heat will spread across Alberta, which has already experienced record heat and its worst spring fire season in memory.  The Alberta fires are so intense that the smoke has been overhead here in Vermont off and on in recent days. 

The new heat wave will surely worsen the Canadian wildfires, so expect more smoke overhead here in New England for much of the rest of this month at least.