Extreme heat in southeast Australia, February 2017

Extreme heat in Australia, Photo by Linda Xu on Unsplash

New South Wales, southeastern Australia, its hottest summer on record in 2017. Temperature records across the central and the eastern parts of Australia were broken, leading the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to issue a Special Climate Statement on the exceptional heat.

Record high temperatures in India, 2016

People in a heatwave, India Photo by Prashanth Pinha on Unsplash

In May 2016, an all-time record high temperature of 51°C was recorded in Rajasthan, India, by some accounts the third-highest temperature ever documented globally. What was behind the extreme heat?