(Bloomberg) — Nearly 9.5 million people in the U.S. Southwest are facing extremely high temperatures as an ongoing heat wave continues to break records and raise the risk of wildfires as far away as the Great Plains.
Las Vegas hit 96 F (36 C) on Saturday, a record for the date, while a nearby local National Weather Service office hit 97 F for the second day in a row, an all-time high for March. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport hit 105 degrees Celsius for the third day in a row, also the highest March temperature on record there.
The heat doesn’t stop. Both Las Vegas and Phoenix are likely to break or tie records for the rest of the week and may extend beyond that period, said Ashton Robinson Cook, a forecaster with the U.S. Weather Forecast Center. Downtown Los Angeles may also set new daily records in the coming week.
“This pattern will continue for the foreseeable future, with record heat continuing through the end of March,” Robinson Cook said. Las Vegas should break or tie records for the next seven days if the forecast holds and Phoenix through the 28th.
In the United States, 383 daily high temperature records will be either broken, broken or threatened over the next seven days, the Weather Prediction Center said. A massive dome of high pressure has raised temperatures across the Southwest and threatens to push warm, dry air into the Great Plains, increasing the threat of wildfires there. A red flag fire warning was issued Sunday for most of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
“With patterns like that, you don’t want to sleep on the threat of fire weather,” Robinson Cook said.
The warmth comes on the heels of a record-warm winter in nine western states, including Texas, Nevada and Arizona, according to the National Center for Environmental Information. California, Nebraska and Kansas had the second warmest winters in 131 years, which was also true for the US as a whole.
Warmth in the West threatens much-needed snowpack in the mountains, which can affect water supplies for people and agriculture later in the year, said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
Overall global warming is partly to blame, but the stuck jet stream pattern that’s pinned high in the Southwest is likely related to expanding ocean heat waves in the North Pacific, which “is also linked to climate change,” Francis said.
“Brutal heat waves are no longer just a summertime problem,” Francis said by email. “These unprecedented events may be a new abnormality that we should expect more often as heat-trapping greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere.”
The long-term forecast shows no relief anytime soon.
Much of the U.S., except for the Northeast, is likely to experience above-normal temperatures through April 4, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said. The agency’s three- to four-week outlook calls for the heat to continue through April 17 in most of the contiguous 48 states.
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