Extraordinary March heatwave in Central Asia up to 10 °C hotter in a warming climate

Extraordinary March heatwave in Central Asia up to 10 °C hotter in a warming climate

Skip to content Shymkent, Kazakhstan. Image by Raban Haaijk. In March 2025, Central Asia experienced an unusually intense heatwave, with temperatures reaching record highs across the region, reaching maxima of 30.8°C Jalalabad in Kyrgyzstan, 29.4°C Namangan, 29.1°C Fergana, in Uzbekistan and minimum temperatures of 18.3°C in Shahdara, making it the hottest March night in Kazakhstan’s…

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Consecutive extreme heat and flooding events in Argentina highlight the risk of managing increasingly frequent and intense hazards in a warming climate

Consecutive extreme heat and flooding events in Argentina highlight the risk of managing increasingly frequent and intense hazards in a warming climate

Ruta 3 highway in Bahía Blanca was damaged by the floods. Credit: Vialidad Nacional jurisdicción Bahía Blanca On 7 March, 2025, Bahía Blanca, Argentina, experienced an unprecedented rainfall event with over 300 mm of rain in just 8 hours, nearly half of the city’s annual average. This extreme event, the heaviest in the city’s recorded…

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Increasing extreme rainfall and rapid urbanisation, major drivers behind Gaborone’s deadly floods

Increasing extreme rainfall and rapid urbanisation, major drivers behind Gaborone’s deadly floods

Skip to content In mid-February 2025, southern Botswana and eastern South Africa were hit by heavy rainfall, sparking severe flooding across the region. The floods claimed at least 31 lives, including 22 in KwaZulu-Natal (Mhlophe-Gumede, 2025), near Durban, and at least nine in Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, amongst them six children (Government of Botswana, 2025). At…

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Women and girls continue to bear disproportionate impacts of heatwaves in South Sudan that have become a constant threat

Women and girls continue to bear disproportionate impacts of heatwaves in South Sudan that have become a constant threat

Skip to content A women collects water in Juba, South Sudan. Image by Rod Waddington. Extreme heat has affected a large region of  continental Eastern Africa since mid-February. Extreme daytime temperatures have been recorded in South Sudan particularly affecting people in poor housing and outdoor workers, a very large part of the population.  After dozens…

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Climate change supercharged late typhoon season in the Philippines, highlighting the need for resilience to consecutive events

Climate change supercharged late typhoon season in the Philippines, highlighting the need for resilience to consecutive events

A Red Cross volunteer speaks to a person affected by the typhoons in Marambong, Pandan, Catanduanes. The 2024 typhoon season in the Philippines was extraordinary, with six typhoons affecting the country within just 30 days, several of them simultaneously active in the region. This clustering of storms in November, never before witnessed in the basin,…

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Can we come up with a meaningful number?

Can we come up with a meaningful number?

Today, three years after his death, and before the 10-year anniversary of World Weather Attribution, the last paper Geert Jan and I worked on together is published.  The paper presents a quantitative statistical synthesis method we have developed over the last eight years of conducting rapid probabilistic event attribution study. It is a statistics focused…

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Conflict, poverty and water management issues exposing vulnerable communities in Africa to extreme floods that are now common events because of climate change

Conflict, poverty and water management issues exposing vulnerable communities in Africa to extreme floods that are now common events because of climate change

Skip to content Red Cross volunteers assist people affected by floods in Kournari, Chad. Image by Red Cross Chad. The rainy season from July to September 2024 was marked by extremely heavy and sometimes unprecedented rainfall in large parts of the Sahel region, leading to catastrophic flooding in Sudan in August and in Nigeria, Niger,…

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