Extreme heat grips Northern Hemisphere on summer solstice

Extreme heat across large tracts of the Northern Hemisphere raised fears for crops in China, fueled forest fires in Portugal and Russia’s Far East, forced flight cancelations in the Southwest US, and melted tarmac on roads in Britain.

As Wednesday marked the summer solstice – the longest day of the year – forecasters said temperatures in Paris were expected to hit 37 C, Madrid could see 38 C, and London was set for 34 C with warnings of thunderstorms.

Rounding up the record temperatures set in the past two months, the World Meteo- rological Organization ( WMO) said the Earth was experiencing “another exceptionally warm year” and the heat waves were unusually early.

“Parts of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States of America have seen extremely high May and June temperatures, with a number of records broken,” the WMO said late on Tuesday.

The trend seen during the past two months has put average monthly global temperatures among the highest ever recorded since data began to be collated in 1880.

Even before this month, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data showed Europe, the US and Northeast Asia – including eastern China, Japan and South Korea – had experienced unusually warm weather between March and May.

Thomson Reuters Eikon data shows that precipitation in Northeast China’s Liaoning Province for the past month has been between 40 and 60 percent below the seasonal norm.

“The drought that hit parts of China’s northeast is the worst for this time of the year in the past decade, in the breadth of areas it has affected and the length of time it has lasted,” Ma Wenfeng, analyst at Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultancy, said.

The hot, dry weather is a major factor behind forest fires that have killed dozens of people in Portugal, while the Russian news agency Tass reported scores of forest fires, mostly in Siberia and the far east region of Irkutsk.