Heat, Drought, and Fire Striking Early in Asia

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/heat-drought-and-fire-striking-early-in-asia?cm_ven=hp-slot-2

Bob Henson · May 6, 2020, 1:41 PM EDT

The warmest winter on record across much of Eurasia has paved the way for spring extremes that are devouring landscapes and rewriting record books. The final week of April pushed summerlike heat up to latitudes further north than Minnesota, and wildfires are off to a destructive start in Siberia, while severe drought in Southeast Asia has led to Earth’s first billion-dollar drought disaster of 2020.

“It’s a monstrously big and very hot air mass for April,” said international weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera of the late-April heat wave in northern Asia.

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Here’s one example: The town of Boguchany—a Siberian village of about 11,000 people at 58.4°N, or about the same latitude as Churchill, Canada, the “polar bear capital of the world”—soared to 31.0°C (87.8°F) on April 25. This didn’t just edge past the town’s previous monthly record of 25.1°C (77.2°F) from April 23, 2011. It smashed it by close to 6°C (11°F).

The new record also tops Boguchany’s normal daily high in July (25.8°C or 78.4°F) by a wide margin.

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Many other Siberian villages saw their hottest April weather on record. In fact, the 32.1°C (89.8°F) notched at Sukhobuzimskoye (latitude 56.5°N) on April 25 is the warmest reading ever confirmed anywhere in the vastness of Asian Russia north of 55°N—an area larger than the entire United States.

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Even in these extreme desert climates, such temperatures are more on par with normal readings in July. Many other Chinese towns and cities set all-time April heat records, according to Etienne Kapikian (Meteo-France).

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Most of 2020 has been unusually warm across Russia, and the parched landscape has been ripe for early-season wildfire throughout much of southern Siberia. The Krasnoyarsk region, which includes Boguchany, was seeing ten times the wildfire extent by late April this year compared to last year, according to Russian emergencies minister Evgeny Zinichev as quoted in the Siberian Times. For the nation as a whole, fire outbreaks were running about 60% ahead of last year, and the acreage burned was about 25% ahead of 2019 levels.

“A critical situation with fires has developed in Siberia and the Far East,” warned Zinichev. “A less snowy winter, an abnormal winter, and insufficient soil moisture are factors that create the conditions for the transition of landscape fires to settlements.”

While some of the fires are agriculture-related, others are apparently coronavirus-related. Many Russians chose to escape urban apartments and quarantine themselves in the countryside, said Sergei Anoprienko, head of Russia’s forest agency Rosleskhoz. “People self-isolated outdoors and forgot about fire safety rules,” he told the Siberian Times. “In some regions, the temperature is already around 30°C, and people just can’t keep themselves in their apartments.

“People rushed outdoors, and as a result we have a surge of thermal points.”

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“The intense heat of 2020 has been accompanied by severe lack of rainfall across parts of Southeast Asia, with severe drought conditions developing in multiple countries. Among the hardest-hit nations have been Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. The government of Thailand has declared a state emergency due to drought-related saltwater intrusions into the aquifers, and the Bank of Ayudhya's Krungsri Research projected that the 2020 dry season could cost the nation as much as $1.5 billion (0.27 percent of GDP.)

“According to insurance broker Aon, drought damages in excess of $1 billion have already occurred in 2020 across the ASEAN nations--Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.”


tags: extreme weather, severe weather