Bangladesh registers hottest April on record
DHAKA: Bangladesh’s weather bureau said on Wednesday that last month was the hottest April on record, with the South Asian nation and much of the region still enduring a suffocating heat wave.
Extensive scientific research has found that climate change is causing heat waves to become longer, more frequent and more intense.
Punishing heat last month prompted Bangladesh’s government to close schools across the country, keeping an estimated 32 million students at home.
“This year the heat wave covered about 80 percent of the country. We’ve not seen such unbroken and expansive heat waves before,” Bangladesh Meteorological Department senior forecaster Muhammad Abul Kalam Mallik told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
He said last month was the hottest April in Bangladesh since records began in 1948 “in terms of hot days and area coverage in the country.”
Weather stations around the country had recorded temperatures between 2 and 8 degrees higher than the 33.2 degrees Celsius (91.8 degrees Fahrenheit) average daily temperature for April between 1981 and 2010, he added.
Health Department spokesman Selim Raihan told AFP that the government had confirmed at least 11 heat stroke-related deaths in the past 10 days.
Rains are expected to bring some relief to Bangladesh on Thursday after a week of sweltering temperatures, with the capital Dhaka recording several days over 40 C (104 F).
Mallik said the severity of the heat had been worsened by the absence of the usual pre-monsoon April thunderstorms, which normally cool the country ahead of summer.
“Bangladesh gets an average of 130.2 millimeters of rain in April. But this April we got an average of 1 mm of rain,” he said.
Mallik added that the bureau was checking data to confirm whether this year marked record low rainfalls for April.
Schools in Bangladesh will remain closed until Sunday.
The government ordered classrooms reopened last weekend, but a top Bangladeshi court directed them to be shut them again on Monday after taking into consideration reports that several teachers had died in the heat wave.
Thousands gathered at mosques and in open fields around the Muslim-majority nation last week to pray for rain.
“Life has become unbearable due to lack of rains,” Muhammad Abu Yusuf, an Islamic cleric who led one such service, told AFP last week. “Poor people are suffering immensely.”
Large swaths of South and Southeast Asia are sweltering through a heat wave that has topped temperature records from Myanmar to the Philippines, with the El Niño weather phenomenon also driving this year’s exceptionally warm weather.
Weather bureaus in Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam and India have also all forecast temperatures above 40 C (104 F).
The months preceding the region’s monsoon, or rainy season, are usually hot, but temperatures this year are well above average in many countries.
Asia is also warming faster than the global average, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization said.