Heatwave season has quietly grown by 39 days, arriving sooner and lasting longer

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By Eric Ralls, earth.com. 

Excerpt: The heatwave season has stretched by about 39 days since 1979, with the biggest shifts in dry regions and a recent rise in fast-peaking heat. Scientists have mostly judged heatwaves by how often they strike, how hot they get and how long they last. When they show up in the year has drawn far less attention, and that timing is shifting across most of the world’s land. A new global analysis finds that the heatwave season now starts earlier, ends later and has been stretching at both ends since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 2023, the first heatwave of the warm season arrived about two weeks earlier, and the last one ended about 24 days later. Put together, the stretch from first heatwave to last grew by roughly 39 days. The researchers counted heat that’s unusual for the date, so an early heatwave isn’t always as hot as one in midsummer. Wenfang Xu of the South China Botanical Garden, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the study’s first author. “In the past, we have mostly focused on whether heatwaves are becoming more frequent, stronger, and longer. Our study further shows that their timing and onset speed are also changing,” Xu said. ...Deserts and dry grasslands moved faster than wet regions. In arid places, the first heatwave arrived about 6 days earlier per decade, about 2.4 times the pace in humid ones.... 

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