In less than a lifetime, about six
and a half decades, heat waves have evolved from sporadic,
isolated episodes to massive, cascading weather events that can
blanket vast swaths of the planet for months or even years at a
time.
The largest heat wave of the 1960s reached about 6% of the
planet as it drifted for 46 days over the Atlantic Ocean, parts
of Latin America and West Africa.
The largest one this decade swept across almost 85% of the
globe during its 367-day lifetime, stretching into the polar
latitudes and touching virtually every human being on Earth.
To continue calling such sprawling phenomena “heat waves”
would be like calling a monsoon a rain shower. To understand the
new reality of these immense expanses of heat, Reuters consulted
with two dozen meteorologists and climate researchers – and
analyzed temperatures for every hour of every day since 1960 for
more than one million grid squares covering the entire globe.
Out of those results we developed a new concept: the “heat
storm.”
Simply put, heat storms are supersized heat waves. Reuters
uses a conservative benchmark to define an ordinary heat wave:
five or more consecutive days of abnormally high temperatures.
Then we define the largest heat waves – those that at their peak
cover at least 1% of the globe, roughly half the size of Canada
– as heat storms.
Applying this definition, Reuters identified a startling
transformation. Heat storms were rare in the 1960s, when they
averaged about five active storms per year. This decade, heat
storms have swarmed the planet, averaging about 102 a year.
One of them caused this summer’s deadly heat in Europe,
notching the highest June temperatures ever recorded in
Bordeaux, Budapest, and Bilbao, the latter of which hit 42.7
degrees Celsius (108.9 degrees Fahrenheit). Roasting Europe for
most of June and July, the heat storm warped steel railroad
tracks, drove what European governments estimated were more than
10,000 excess deaths in a single week, and prompted Belgian
zookeepers to cool their tigers by feeding them raw meat encased
in ice.
The largest heat storm on record – the one that lasted for
367 days over 2023-2024 and reached almost 85% of the globe –
sent temperatures in parts of the Philippines up to 38 C (100.5
F), immiserating students in the country’s mostly
unairconditioned schools. In Manila, math teacher Joel Arrojado
recalled a student who was face-down at his desk, crying. When
Arrojado coaxed the boy into looking up, Arrojado saw his face
and chest covered in blood. The boy, Arrojado said, had suffered
a spontaneous nosebleed, a common problem in extreme heat. As
more blood pumped from his nostrils, Arrojado recalled, the
child pleaded with Arrojado to call his mother.
As the same heat storm encased southern Louisiana for
months, it exacerbated a historic drought.The state burned,
suffering what the governor called “theworst wildfire we’ve seen
since at least the Second World War” – and close to 600 other
fires in August alone. Two months later, smoke from a smoldering
marsh fire developed into a blinding “super fog” that caused a
highway pile-up of at least 158 cars, killing seven people.
The same heat storm helped fuel a 2023 Mediterranean cyclone
that dropped massive rains over Libya. In the dead of night, two
dams burst near the coastal town of Derna, washing away entire
neighborhoods. A week later, on her hands and knees, Sabreen
Blil clawed with her bare hands at the rubble of her brother’s
house, hoping to dig out the dead. As she wept, she recited
their names. “Taym, Yazan, Luqman, Salmah, Tumador, Hakim and
his wife. Oh my God. My family, where are you?” she wailed. “Oh
God. Even just one – my God – just let me find even one body.”
During the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, the heat
storm drove temperatures at Mecca’s Grand Mosque to 51.8 C
(125.2 F), killing more than 1,300 pilgrims. Bodies lay in the
streets. And as Europe’s largest recorded fire spread in Greece
during the span of that same heat storm, the inferno killed
migrants traversing the thick Dadia forest. Their corpses
remained in the woods for days; even the vultures that might
have fed on the bodies had fled the flames.
These far-flung and seemingly unrelated catastrophes all
shared a common connection: one single heat storm.
Heat storms inflict “a major disruption to global
civilization,” said James Renwick, professor of physical
geography at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington.
“Heat is the biggest killer from climate change,” he said,
noting that it can lead to “famine, hunger, death, conflict over
resources.”
A NEW WAY TO UNDERSTAND CLIMATE CHANGE
Heat storms constitute a new way to conceptualize how
Earth’s climate is changing as humanity pumps greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere.
The determination by climatologists that the average global
temperature in 2025 was 1.47 C (2.6 F) above the pre-industrial
level is useful to scientists and policymakers, but to many
people it’s so abstract as to be meaningless. What people do
understand are heat waves – in Spanish, an “ola de calor”; in
Arabic, a “mawjat hararia”; in Mandarin, a “rè làng.”
Yet no universal definition of a heat wave exists. For
example, authorities differ over duration: The US National
Weather Service defines a heat wave as “abnormally and
uncomfortably hot” weather typically lasting “two or more days,”
while the meteorological agencies of Australia, France, Spain
and the United Kingdom set the threshold at three days. Some of
those countries also have different rules for what temperatures
qualify as a heat wave.
Moreover, what constitutes a heat wave in Anchorage, Alaska,
would not be considered a heat wave in Kuwait City. The climate
in those places differs sharply, and a heat wave is an unusual
period of hot weather for a particular place.
Such dueling definitions made it all but impossible to gauge
whether heat waves are more common globally now than in the
past. But the system Reuters has devised delivers the precision
needed to do so.
We began by determining the historical temperature range for
each day of the year from 1961 to 1990 for each of 1.04 million
grid squares around the globe. The temperature data comes from
the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and our
detailed methodology is here. A heat wave occurs when the daily
high temperature for any location reaches at least the 90th
percentile of the historical range – in other words, the hottest
10% – for five days in a row.
So a July heat wave in Istanbul is five or more consecutive
days of at least 25.6 C (78.1 F), whereas one in Phoenix,
Arizona, needs to reach 40.3 C (104.5 F).
In Reuters’ definition, a heat wave can happen in any
season, so in Istanbul a January heat wave would be five
consecutive days of at least (11.2 C) (52.2 F), and in Phoenix
the threshold would be 20.8 C (69.4 F).
To measure the geographical extent of heat waves, we map
neighboring heat wave grid squares that form a cohesive area.
Because very large heat waves exert an expanding effect on the
planet’s rising temperatures, Reuters created a further
definition: If at any point a heat wave covers 1% of the planet,
we designate it a heat storm and give it a name, as is done with
tropical storms and hurricanes.
Naming events is “a powerful way for people to understand
that something is happening,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of
the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Reuters.
Yet “we don’t currently do that with heat waves,” he said, even
though heat has been estimated to kill almost half a million
people a year. Defining and naming heat storms is an important
innovation, he added, and could help people to track impacts and
consequences.
As their numbers have swelled over the decades, heat storms
and heat waves have not only caused individual catastrophes.
They have also helped drive lasting, systemic effects.
They exacerbate droughts and intensify fires – from Chile to
Europe, the largest conflagrations on record happened during
heat storms — and if they hit while a woman is pregnant, studies
have found that she’s more likely to suffer everything from
stillbirth to preeclampsia, a leading killer of expecting and
post-partum women.
Warmer temperatures can usher in benefits, at least for some
regions. Siberia now produces almost as much wheat as Russia’s
traditional breadbasket near the Black Sea. That’s in part
because increasing heat storms and heat waves have helped open
far northern latitudes to agriculture while simultaneously
contributing to droughts around the Black Sea that reduce
production there.
18 YEARS OF CONSTANT HEAT STORMS
Tens of thousands of ordinary heat waves flicker in and out
of existence every year. Like heat storms, they too have
escalated in number, more than doubling from the 1960s to this
decade. The vast majority are small, however, never even
covering 0.01% of the planet, about the size of a square that
you could drive across in less than two and a half hours. Only a
minuscule fraction of heat waves ever gets big enough to become
heat storms, which currently number about 102 annually.
Yet heat storms now claim the lion’s share of Earth’s
unusually hot days, those in the top tenth of the historical
range. In the 1960s, heat storms averaged 3% a year for any
given spot on the planet. (The remainder comprised ordinary
heatwaves and short bursts of heat that didn’t last long enough
to become a heatwave.)
This decade, heat storms have accounted for almost 43% of
such days.
As greenhouse gas emissions have increased, so too have heat
storms and ordinary heat waves. From the 1960s to this decade,
the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by
more than 30%. Over that time, the average portion of the planet
likely to be covered by heat storms and heat waves has risen
more than 12-fold. El Niño – the periodic episodes of unusually
warm water in the Pacific Ocean that drive major weather
patterns – has acted as an accelerant, intensifying heat storms
and heat waves.
Reuters has also examined the opposite of heat waves and
heat storms – cold snaps and cold storms. They have dwindled.
From the 1960s to this decade, the total area in a cold snap or
cold storm on an average winter day has shrunk by almost 80%.
Despite their mammoth scale, the phenomenon of heat storms
has been largely invisible to the public. Until recent decades,
heat storms were rarer and smaller, so easier to overlook.
But perhaps as importantly, they hadn’t been defined and
named in the sharp way that typhoons and hurricanes are. Yes,
people in Montreal, Perth and Hong Kong knew they were baking in
a stretch of hot days – but they did not know that they were all
experiencing one unitary heat storm.
As part of this series examining heat storms and their
effects, Reuters has integrated an online Heat Storm Tracker
into our regular weather coverage. With this tool, people can
see what had previously gone unnoticed and, using that
knowledge, tally the impact of heat storms as they rage across
regions.
The rapid evolution of heat has not only made individual
heat storms larger. Now, in sharp contrast to even 20 years ago,
massive heat storms often run into, merge with, and split off
from one another. What has become common are heat storms that
run consecutively, simultaneously or both – heat storm cascades.
The duration of these cascades swelled from an average of
roughly two months in the 1960s to nine months in the first part
of the 2000s. Then, on July 6, 2008, a cascade started – and has
not stopped. For more than 18 years straight, 6,681 days, at
least one heat storm has been roiling the planet, and often more
than one.
Many of them have been colossal. In the almost half century
between 1960 and the start of the current 18-year cascade, only
five heat storms had ever reached a peak size bigger than a
tenth of the planet, about the area of Europe and Asia combined.
The ongoing cascade has included 56 such mega heat storms.
The largest of these was one we have named Heat Storm Vera,
the storm that killed the Hajj pilgrims, intensified the
Louisiana wildfires, and touched nearly 85% of the planet over
its 367-day lifespan.
What follows is a biography of Vera, from its birth on July
29, 2023, through its last day on July 29, 2024, that shows how
the storm connected and often devastated communities scattered
across the globe.
TEXAS, AUGUST 2023: FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
On a sweltering evening in August 2023, as Heat Storm Vera
coiled around the American South, Justice Trumpler led his high
school football team onto the field for the season’s first game.
In hopes of playing college ball, the 17-year-old captain had
invited coaches and recruiters to watch. As the game kicked off
at 7:30pm, the temperature was 37.8 C (100 F).
Texas’s passion for high school football – the American
version, not the one that transfixed billions during this
summer’s World Cup – was captured in the iconic movie Friday
Night Lights, about a team gunning for the state championship.
But players of American football suffer 11 times as many
heat-related injuries as athletes in all other sports combined,
according to data from the University of Connecticut Korey
Stringer Institute.
That’s because the football season starts in the summer, the
sport demands intense physical exertion, and many of its
players, such as the 255-pound offensive lineman Trumpler, have
large bodies that are harder to cool down. There’s another
reason: In contrast to most other warm-weather sports, American
football features heat-trapping helmets and heavy padding.
Meanwhile, Texas is spending ever more time in extreme heat.
Across the entire three decades from 1960 to 1989, the city of
Austin – home to Trumpler’s Bowie High School – experienced a
total of 557 days in heat waves and heat storms. This decade,
our analysis shows, that number has already surpassed 700.
During the football season, Heat Storm Vera enveloped Austin for
39 days.
By halftime, the Bowie Bulldogs led 14-0. As the teams broke
apart, Trumpler’s parents said they watched him walk to the
field’s edge and vomit. A trainer hosed it away.
Through the second half, they saw Trumpler stop to dry heave
at least twice, they said, and he seemed slow to get off the
turf after plays. At one point, his parents saw him walk toward
the opposing team’s huddle, a sign of mental confusion.
Trumpler’s father, Jason Trumpler, told Reuters he began
shouting from the bleachers for the coaches to pull his son out
of the game. When that didn’t work, he went to the railing
separating the stands from the field and continued yelling.
Trumpler kept playing.
Bowie’s coach did not respond to multiple requests for
comment. The school’s principal referred Reuters to a school
district spokesman, who did not respond to messages seeking
comment.
Other players struggled, too. So many boys fell to the
ground after plays that Bowie’s game commentators declared it a
“cramp epidemic.” By the fourth quarter, the score was tied. The
coaches could have ended the game, but the referee announced it
would go into overtime.
“Both teams are going to start on the 25 (yard line) of
their opposition and, uh, keep on going until somebody dies,”
said one commentator. “Don’t say that,” replied the other.
The “unfortunate” phrasing, the first commentator told
Reuters, was intended to convey how hard the teams were playing
under very tough conditions.
Just before the second-to-last play, a leg cramp brought
Trumpler to the ground. His coach finally pulled him out. “Texas
has that mentality of ‘you gotta be tough, you gotta play
through pain,’” said Jason.
Jason took Trumpler home, but the teen couldn’t stop
throwing up. After an ice bath failed to cool Trumpler down,
Jason said, he drove his son to the hospital. When Trumpler’s
mother, Jennifer Norman-Wolfe, arrived, he couldn’t recognize
her voice, she said, and couldn’t tell her how many brothers he
had.
Reuters was not able to review Trumpler’s medical records,
but his parents said tests showed their son’s kidneys were
failing, and his brain was swelling so much that doctors said
they might need to drill a hole in his skull to relieve the
pressure. Doctors couldn’t assure them their son would survive,
they said.
Twelve high school football players in the US have died from
heat over the last decade, according to statistics compiled by
the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research.
Trumpler was released after two days in the hospital.
Later, his parents said, they sent his medical records to
Bowie High School and tried to discuss what had gone wrong. But
they said the school’s athletic staff infuriated them by
suggesting they hadn’t done enough to alert coaches about his
condition during the game, Trumpler’s father told Reuters. A
month later, Trumpler’s parents saw a video of an official for
the governing body for Texas high school sports, the University
Interscholastic League, referring to their son’s injury as a
“questionable” heat-related incident.
Neither the school district nor the UIL official responded
to requests for comment. In an interview, UIL Executive Director
Jamey Harrison said that the organization relies on schools to
report the details of medical events and avoids instituting
rules based on individual incidents.
Heat storms are starting to reshape Texas football. State
filings show that since the beginning of this year, at least
four school districts in the state have registered to build
indoor or covered practice spaces, two with price tags in excess
of $10 million. And this year, the UIL adopted new rules
requiring rest breaks, ice baths and shortenings or
cancellations of practices in high heat. Yet these rules are not
mandatory for football games themselves.
Two weeks after his hospitalization, as Heat Storm Vera
continued baking Austin, Trumpler resumed playing football. He
declined to speak to Reuters, but wrote on X at the time that
“it felt so good to return.”
His heat injury, however, seemed to throw off college
recruiters. Division I teams, those with the biggest and best
programs, stopped calling, Trumpler’s father recalled. His
mother said Trumpler himself seemed tepid about the prospect,
which had once been his dream, and he is not currently attending
college.
“Our son, Justice, is tough and built for football, mentally
and physically,” she wrote at the time. “This heat was tougher.”
SPAIN, AUGUST 2023: “PIRATES OF LIQUID GOLD”
Early in the morning of August 30, 2023, a team of thieves
carefully maneuvered a tanker truck through the winding roads of
the small Spanish town of Carcabuey, intent on an audacious
heist.
Around 2:30 a.m., according to a local police official, the
thieves pulled into a gated driveway on the edge of town. They
shut off lights and cut through the rickety gate’s padlock. They
left no fingerprints because they wore gloves. Once inside, they
beelined for their unusual loot: extra virgin olive oil, which
they siphoned from industrial-sized tanks.
Over the previous several months, a series of heat storms
had helped fuel a drought that devastated the olive crop and
sent the price of olive oil skyrocketing, raising the value of
the stolen 56 metric tons to a staggering $546,000. Journalists
nicknamed the thieves the Pirates of Liquid Gold.
By dawn, when the olive mill’s manager, Martín Parras,
arrived, all that remained was an oil streak on the driveway.
Parras was so overcome, he said, that he walked into a nearby
olive grove, sat beneath the trees and wept.
In Spain’s southern region around Carcabuey, houses are
painted white to repel the sun, and residents take long breaks
during the hot afternoons. Olive trees, which evolved to have
formidable heat tolerance, have thrived here for centuries.
But the trees have struggled in the new heat storm era.
Between March 12 and August 1, when Vera first reached
Carcabuey, the little town endured eight other heat storms that
rolled one into the next with almost no break. The combination
of early heat and scarce rain burned the olive flowers,
preventing them from opening and pollinating, Parras said.
In the past five to 10 years, locals say, the heat that once
lasted from June to August can now stretch from April to
November, and it stays hot later into the evening. “People used
to go out around 7 or 8 in summers but now it can be 9 or 9:30
and there’s no one in the streets,” said Juan Lara, who has been
running a pastry shop near Carcabuey for 46 years.
Heat Storm Vera spent a total of 127 days over Carcabuey. At
first, Vera teased the city, brushing it briefly before
smothering the town for three weeks until a couple of days
before the theft. Temperatures surpassed 40 C (104 F) several
times.
Parras said about half the olives at his Marín Serrano El
Lagar mill ended up unusable, with scant flesh and barely any
oil. “Olive trees had a yellow color like when grass dries, and
leaves fell,” he recalled. “It was monstrous.”
The price of olive oil spiked by 44% that year, largely
because the withering heat and drought reduced output by roughly
half in Spain, the world’s largest producer. Some Spanish
supermarkets placed alarms on bottles to prevent theft, but no
one thought thieves would target a mill’s huge metal tanks. At
Marín Serrano El Lagar, the only alarms were in the office and a
room storing oil that was already bottled.
Spanish police arrested a 50-year-old man who had crushed
olives at the mill for more than two decades until he left in
2020 after an argument over his salary. Authorities suspect the
man conspired to steal the oil with the owner of a rival mill
just down the road, the local police official said. The owner
was also arrested. Both men were later released, but remain
under investigation. They told Reuters they did not steal the
oil, with the 50-year-old suspect saying he’s eager to clear his
name.
The real culprit, according to mill manager Parras, has not
been indicted. “Climate change has completely affected olive
fields,” he said. “Has it been the cause of the theft? Totally.”
If the heat hadn’t driven the price so high, he added, “There
would have been no theft.”
BRAZIL, SEPTEMBER 2023: DEATH OF THE DOLPHINS
On September 28, 2023, an environmental scientist named Ayan
Fleischmann sat in a small boat at the heart of a vast Amazonian
lake and watched a dolphin die. The creature moved in jagged
circles, its body shuddering. Suddenly, it sank.
As Fleischmann watched the dolphin vanish into the darkness
of Lake Tefé, smoke from nearby wildfires fouled the air. An
algal bloom stained the waters blood-red. Dozens of dolphin
corpses dotted the lake’s beaches. Photos taken by Fleischmann’s
team show the dolphins’ skin wrinkled like melted plastic or
peeling to reveal yellow flesh. This, Fleischmann recalled
thinking, might be what Hell looks like.
With its distinctive pink color, the river dolphin is one of
the Amazon’s most iconic and mythologized creatures. According
to legend, they would transform into humans at night to seduce
locals. The dolphin was put on the endangered species list eight
years ago, after poaching and rainforest destruction caused its
numbers to plummet. Now, heat storms have emerged as an urgent
new threat.
Heat Storm Vera settled over the Amazon in late July and
spent a total of nearly seven months over Lake Tefé, simmering
it for 42 days in a row before Fleischmann watched the dolphin
die. The heat storm helped warm the lake to a high of 41 C
(105.8 F) – the temperature of a standard jacuzzi. For the
dolphins, such temperatures were catastrophic: Fleischmann’s
research team later concluded that the creatures had effectively
been cooked alive.
Fleischmann, 34, had been studying how the waters of Lake
Tefé were changing for several years. “It became a friend. I see
it every day,” he said. But as the heat storm festered, he
recalled, so much of the lake dried up that when he and his
colleagues visited local villages, they were pelted by
whirlwinds of sand whipped up from newly exposed beaches.
Later, Fleischmann’s research institute autopsied the
dolphins that washed up on the lake’s shores. Temperatures were
so high that most of the corpses rotted faster than they could
be studied, said Hilda Chávez-Pérez, a biologist who oversaw the
study of the bodies. But in those they could examine, she said,
the researchers kept finding that the dolphins’ brains were
bruised and their organs speckled with blood: telltale signs of
heat stress. Many had empty stomachs, indicating that they had
lost the ability to feed in the heat.
The lake’s normal population is at least 700 river dolphins,
said Fleischmann, but during September and October, when Vera
scalded the area for all but one day, more than 200 died.
“Nobody had ever seen that magnitude of mortality,” he said. “It
was like a death circus.”
POLAND, FEBRUARY 2024: WEIRD WINTERS
In Poland’s Tatra Mountains, the first months of 2024 were
full of strange signs.
In mid-February, bears woke from hibernation weeks early and
began roaming the ranges. Frogs also emerged early, ranger
Tomasz Zając remembered, rising from the rotting leaves and
underwater silt beneath which they had hunkered through the cold
months. Although snow still clung to the high peaks, it was so
slushy that it frequently slipped in mini-avalanches that left
black scars of exposed rock.
While heat storms are hottest in summer, they can also
mellow typically frigid months. Heat Storm Vera, which enveloped
the Tatras for 31 days in January and February, sent the
temperature up to 17 C (62.6 F). In neighboring Germany, Vera
prompted the country’s weather service to tell people to leave
behind their warm coats as they celebrated the annual winter
carnival, while in the UK, television hosts joked about
unusually “hot and steamy” Valentine’s Day temperatures in the
English town of Lover.
But winter heat storms can also cause unexpected harm. In
January of this year, bone-chilling cold descended on eastern
Canada and the US, causing Toronto to endure 23 straight days of
sub-freezing cold and gripping parts of Minnesota in
temperatures that plunged to minus 41.7 C (minus 43 F).
Paradoxically, those frigid temperatures were largely caused by
winter heat waves in the northern polar regions and Greenland,
where residents basked in unseasonably balmy days that reached
11.3 C (52.3 F). That northern mass of warm air shunted a cold
front down over eastern North America, in what climatologists
call a polar vortex.
Tennessee got so cold that freezing rain encased trees in
ice, causing many to collapse under the weight. Forest silence
was occasionally broken by a sound resembling gunshots as sap
froze and expanded, splintering tree trunks. Almost half of
Pittsburgh’s snowplows stopped working, forcing the city to
leave roads uncleared for days and trash on the streets for a
week. The extreme cold killed at least 100 people across the US,
caused power losses for more than a million customers, drove
more flight cancellations than any time since the COVID 19
pandemic, and forced school closures from Milwaukee to Atlanta.
Even in Cuba, farmers woke to frost on their crops.
Heat Storm Vera spent weeks over Europe in January and
February, effectively transforming winter into spring. By
mid-February, local media estimated that a quarter of European
ski resorts were closed due to lack of snow. It was so warm that
many resorts couldn’t even make artificial powder. Amid the
unseasonal heat, intense rain battered parts of Europe and
neighboring countries; as Vera settled over the southern Turkish
city of Antalya, flash floods inundated entire neighborhoods,
with the sudden flow submerging fire trucks and buses.
In the Tatra Mountains, winter’s end is marked by the
blossoming of crocuses. More than a hundred million typically
bloom starting in mid- to late-March, turning the valleys into
purple oceans. Rangers have to patrol Chochołowska Glade – where
crocuses bloom most densely – to prevent tourists stampeding the
flowers into the ground. In late February, that frenzy was
supposed to be weeks away. But on February 29, ranger Zając
noticed a flash of color amidst Chochołowska’s freshly-uncovered
grass. He squatted to get a better look at the purple petals
unfolding around an orange stamen. Earlier than he could ever
remember, the first crocus had arrived.
THE PHILIPPINES, APRIL 2024: COLLAPSING CHILDREN
Partway through April 2024, on the top floor of Saghakan
High School in the Philippines’ Tacloban City, Jeffrey Polido
was giving a lesson on typhoons to 50 sweating 14-year-olds in a
concrete classroom with two rickety fans. Interrupting him, a
student burst through the door with news: Yet another child had
collapsed.
Polido – a 37-year-old science teacher who at that time ran
the school’s health clinic – raced outside to the stricken girl
and took her vitals. He and the student who had alerted him
carried the child down several flights of stairs to the clinic
to recover. Then, Polido walked back to his roasting classroom
and resumed teaching, knowing it would happen all over again.
After all, he told Reuters, he had already seen dozens of
students collapse.
Polido, along with the teacher who comforted the student
with the gushing nosebleed, didn’t know it but they were on the
frontline of Heat Storm Vera. The heat was intensified by its
most dangerous accomplice: humidity. As a result, a temperature
of 33 C (91.4 F) in steamy Tacloban felt like 47 C (116.5 F),
while hotter parts of the Philippines reached “feels like”
levels of 53 C (127.5 F) – at which point the country’s weather
bureau warned, “Heat stroke is imminent.” For the millions of
children in schools cooled only by fans, the thick muggy heat
was especially dangerous.
In Manila, Jenita Simangan, 49, watched her 50-strong class
of five-year-olds break out into rashes, complain of headaches,
and say the heat made their skin feel like it was burning, she
recalled. Partway through the heat spell, she said, one
five-year-old staggered into class and began vomiting
uncontrollably. As the child stood in a puddle of watery bile
speckled with half-digested chunks of lunch, Simangan felt
herself panic. It was the worst moment she’d experienced in two
decades of teaching, she said.
Heat Storm Vera hit Tacloban particularly hard, tormenting
the city for a total of more than nine months. Standing in a
rare spot of shade at Sagkahan High School earlier this year,
Cloe Novella, 17, recalled sitting in her class and trying to
catch the weak breeze from one of the classroom’s old fans when
she realized one of her best friends hadn’t said anything since
they sat down. Turning around, Novella saw her friend appeared
to be sleeping, tapped her, and quickly realized that her friend
had lost consciousness. Novella’s teacher told one of her
classmates to fetch Polido, who came and carried the student to
the clinic, where she recovered. She was one of more than 40 who
Polido estimated fainted during Vera.
The Philippines soon suspended in-person classes across the
country and has since changed its school calendar to avoid
exposing students to the most extreme temperatures. Yet for
Novella and her fellow students, Heat Storm Vera kickstarted a
new era of near-perpetual heat.
LJ Corsanes, 17, said he frequently plunges into
temperature-induced panic attacks. “It’s like going into a
fight,” he said of going outside. “It’s like opening a door to
hell.”
Over the entire 1960s, heat storms hit Tacloban for only 7
days, and the city experienced 245 days of ordinary heat waves.
This decade, ordinary heat waves have touched Tacloban for fewer
than 40 days – but heat storms have engulfed the city for more
than 1,470 days. That’s over 200 days a year.
Tropical archipelagos such as the Philippines are
particularly vulnerable to heat storms, Reuters’ analysis shows.
The warm ocean heats the air from below while sunshine not only
beats down from above but also reflects off the surrounding
water. Other tropical islands, such as Guam, Haiti and much of
Indonesia, spend most of the year in heat storms.
The implacable heat is forcing students to learn grim new
skills. In July, Polido gathered 80-odd teenagers for first aid
training with the Red Cross. Over two days, they practiced how
to begin chest compressions, how to lift an unconscious person
to safety, and how to position someone who has passed out so
they don’t choke on their tongues.
For some, the heat has become eerily normal. Novella said it
makes her feel “like I am burning in pain and fire.” But, she
added, “It is not strange, because I am used to feeling the heat
already.”
IVORY COAST, NOVEMBER 2023-JUNE 2024: DEATH OF A CHOCOLATE
CHIEF
In his half-century as a farmer of cocoa, the raw ingredient
of chocolate, Chief Brou Kouassi earned enough money to marry
five times, send his 12 children to school, and float a little
cash to his neighbors. He even had a nickname – “À Nous Deux”,
or “Just Between Us” – a phrase people used when they came
seeking assistance on the hush-hush.
In 2023, Heat Storm Vera started stalking Digrikro, the
village in western Ivory Coast where Kouassi had been chief
since 2000. At first, the heat storm came and went, lurking for
up to two weeks at a time. Then, beginning November 1, Vera
besieged the area for more than four months straight, sometimes
sending temperatures above 38 C (100.4 F). “La secheresse” – the
drought – also began in November, according to local farmers and
United Nations rainfall data.
His sons had taken over the hard labor, but every morning
Kouassi still pulled on his boots and went out to survey his
22-hectare farm. As Heat Storm Vera shriveled the pods and sent
brittle leaves falling from the branches, Kouassi would shake
his head and lament that he had never seen so many trees dead or
dying.
His sons would go out in the morning with their machetes to
cut down the cocoa pods but return just a few hours later
because, as Kouassi’s son Jules put it, “the trees didn’t give
us anything.” Jules said the cocoa yield on his portion of the
land for February to April 2024, an important harvesting time,
was less than half of normal.
Ivory Coast and its neighbor Ghana produce about 50% of the
world’s cocoa. But in the wake of Heat Storm Vera, the harvest
in those two countries fell by half.
Vera had collaborators, among them disease, which preys more
easily on heat-and-drought-weakened cocoa trees, and an El Niño,
which likely intensified the heat storm. But Vera and the
drought it exacerbated were relentless, with the heat storm
lingering over one cocoa region of Ghana for a total of almost
11 months. In 2024, the price of cocoa almost tripled.
In West Africa, where almost all the cocoa is produced by
smallholder farms such as Kouassi’s, the stakes were
existential. Kouassi urged his sons to abandon cocoa for
heat-resistant crops such as rubber or cashews. “He kept saying,
‘If you don’t replace the cocoa trees, you’ll have nothing to
eat,’” recalled Jules.
In June 2024, as Heat Storm Vera took its last licks at
Digrikro, Kouassi fell ill. After a medicinal broth of leaves
didn’t work, his family sent him to the hospital, where Jules
recalls doctors saying his father had malaria and anemia. He
spent four days in the hospital, at a cost of 320,000 CFA, or
about $525. But his illness persisted, so they sent him back
again, paying another $525. They considered a third trip for the
same high cost, but they couldn’t afford to keep sending him
back because the devastation of the cocoa crop had beggared the
family.
Kouassi’s one-story concrete farmhouse offered little
respite from the clammy heat. As his illness worsened – swelling
that began in his feet spread all the way up to his thighs – he
struggled to sleep more than a few hours each night. With money
scarce and Western medicine failing, he asked to go to the
village where he was born to visit a traditional healer or, if
that failed, to be buried next to his parents.
Kouassi traveled by bus, which typically takes more than six
hours to cover the 200 kilometers, much of it on a choppy dirt
road. Years earlier, before heat storms shattered his
livelihood, Kouassi had built an eight-bedroom house there with
a large patio, where he relished visits from relatives and
neighbors, some whispering hush-hush stories. His sons hoped the
more comfortable environment and traditional remedies might help
him regain his health.
The healer took 90,000 CFA, a little less than $160, then
refused any more payments even though he kept bringing clay pots
filled with medicinal concoctions. But his father continued to
decline, Jules recalled, and finally pulled his son aside and
asked him “to take care of the family because he didn’t know if
he would survive.” Kouassi died on October 27, 2024, aged 68. No
official cause of death was given.
His beloved cocoa farm has not recovered. Many of the trees
are dead or sick, Jules said, and revenue remains in a rut.
Kouassi himself lies buried under a blank headstone, his family
unable to afford the finishing tribute: a name plaque. Nor have
they been able to raise enough money for a traditional funeral,
a fact that torments Jules. In the culture of their Baoulé
ethnic group, the failure to hold that ceremony – complete with
a sheep sacrifice, drumming and dancing – means his father
cannot go peacefully into the afterlife. “It’s like his soul is
still walking around here,” Jules said, “unable to rest.”
FEBRUARY, 2026: A MASSIVE NEW HEAT STORM
Over its lifetime, Heat Storm Vera drifted over nearly 85%
of the planet, more than any heat storm on record. Its peak
size, covering 31.3% of the Earth on January 5, 2024, was also a
record. Until this summer.
Heat Storm Raimundo, which broiled Europe and stoked massive
wildfires in Spain and France, extended over 33.8% of the globe
on August 28. Since its inception on February 28, 2026, Raimundo
has touched almost three quarters of the planet’s surface.
Both heat storms spent time over a melting Nepalese glacier
before its collapse on August 26 and the catastrophic flooding
that followed, killing thousands. Early indications suggest that
warming temperatures contributed to the collapse of the glacier
and the bedrock beneath it.
Up until the glacier gave way, it had spent about 58% of
this decade in a heat storm or heat wave, up from 7% during the
1960s. For the six days immediately preceding its collapse, the
glacier had been blanketed by Heat Storm Raimundo.
Raimundo isn’t yet finished. It has been heating the earth
for 235 days and counting.
Published on October 20, 2026
