Oct.20 (Reuters) In less than a lifetime, about six and a half decades, heat waves have evolved from sporadic, isolated episodes to massive, cascading weather events that can blanket vast swaths of the planet for months or even years at a time.
The largest heat wave of the 1960s reached about 6% of the planet as it drifted for 46 days over the Atlantic Ocean, parts of Latin America and West Africa.
The largest one this decade swept across almost 85% of the globe during its 367-day lifetime, stretching into the polar latitudes and touching virtually every human being on Earth.
To continue calling such sprawling phenomena “heat waves” would be like calling a monsoon a rain shower. To understand the new reality of these immense expanses of heat, Reuters consulted with two dozen meteorologists and climate researchers – and analyzed temperatures for every hour of every day since 1960 for more than one million grid squares covering the entire globe. Out of those results we developed a new concept: the “heat storm.”
Read full article: Giant ‘heat storms’ are scorching Earth. The story of the biggest one.
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