In Many Areas, Dangerous Summer Heat Waves Now Hit In The Spring

Springtime heat waves are growing more frequent,
widespread and deadly worldwide, 
thanks to climate change 

It's a relatively cool, rainy day here in Vermont, but something weird is happening with spring around the world. 

In many cases across the Northern Hemisphere, it's no longer that pleasant, mild time of year in which everything blooms. 

Instead, increasingly, many locations are getting blasted by strangely torrid weather. 

In many other areas of the world, where extreme summer heat is now a springtime thing, too, thanks to climate change. 

It's been going on pretty much yearly in the past decade, and the phenomenon is becoming more frequent and widespread. It's not just that these spring heat waves are weird. They're dangerous. 

As Vox reports:

"Cities like Phoenix and Palm Springs, California, closed in on triple digits in March; Phoenix usually doesn't reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit until May. This month, hundreds of millions of people across India and Pakistan, experienced temperatures as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit, triggering power outages and protests. The heat has also created conditions for thousands of wildfires in the region."

It's not just this year in which spring heat waves are popping up all over the place. 

Vox continues:

"It's part of a pattern. Last year, heat waves coursed through Africa and Europe during the spring, setting new temperature records in more than a dozen countries. Mexico experienced a series of heat waves beginning in April. A heat wave in Texas in May sent power demand to a record high for the month."

Heat waves are very often deadly, killing thousands of people every year. In some ways, these new spring heat waves might be even deadlier that ones that hit in July or August in the northern hemisphere. 

People are not acclimatized yet to hot weather and then a heat wave arrives prematurely.  The shock to the system can kill in some cases.

The spring heat waves also just make summer seemingly last forever.  The longer a heat wave goes on, the more punishing they are on the human body, unless people have access to cool rooms and plenty of water. Perhaps billions of people around the world have little or no access to air conditioning.

And spring heat - especially when they keep  going into the summer -   can cause droughts, contribute to wildfires and strain electrical grids. 

LATEST HEAT WAVES

 In the past few days, unprecedented early season heat has hit a broad area of North Africa, the Mideast, and adjacent parts of Asia. 

Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who carefully tracks heat waves around the world is calling this huge heat wave an extraordinary event. "Thousands of stations will pulverize their records in the next days... with the hugest margins seen in climatic history," he wrote on X. 

Some examples in the past few days include 113 degrees in Gaya, Niger, the hottest temperature on record for any month in that area. 

 It was also 113 degrees in Hazeva, Israel. At Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, Israel,  it was 104 degrees.

Kuwait gets incredibly hot in the summer, but not quite so much in the spring. Until now. It was 120 degrees in Kuwait this week, their hottest April temperatures on record. 

Saudi Arabia also saw its hottest April weather on record with temperatures as high as 115 degrees. 

In war-torn Sudan temperatures in the past week have gotten as hot as 112 during the day and failed to drop below the mid-80s at night.  Heat waves are more dangerous when it does not cool off at night, as the unrelenting temperatures never give the human body to recover from the extreme heat of the day. 

Other incredible heat examples this week include 108 in Turkmenistan, 104 in Uzbekistan, and 100 degrees in Kazakhstan.  

The Pakistan Meteorological Department has warned residents of that nation to expect more unprecedented April heat through the end of the month before cooler storms arrive in early May. 

VERMONT SPRING HEAT

Dangerous heat waves are of course less likely here in Vermont than in many other parts of the world. But heat waves have been known to kill even here.  Six Vermonters lost their lives in an intense July, 2018 heat wave for instance

Vermont, too, has been experience weird spring hot spells in recent years and decades. So far, this spring has mostly been an exception to the hot early season weather. Though we did have three days in March this year that got into the 70s, which is pretty strange.

Temperatures reaching 90 degrees in May used to be relatively rare in Vermont. But half the Mays since 2010 have gotten to 90 degrees or more in Burlington, Vermont. 

Some specific spring heat waves recently have been really something.  

On April 13 2023, the temperature in Burlington reached 88 degrees, by far the earliest on record it's been that hot. It was 89 degrees that day in Springfield, Vermont. 

On May 27, 2020, the temperature in Burlington reached a torrid 95 degrees, breaking the old record for hottest day in May by two degrees. On June 1, 2023, it was 96 in Burlington, the hottest for so early in the season.