Temperatures are expected to start climbing significantly Saturday in parts of the Pacific Northwest as an early heat wave takes hold, possibly breaking records and worsening wildfires already burning in western Canada. The historically temperate region has grappled with scorching summer temperatures and unprecedented wildfires fueled by climate change in recent years. The National Weather Service issued a heat advisory lasting from Saturday through Monday for much of the western parts of both Oregon and Washington state. It said the temperatures could raise the risk of heat-related illness, particularly for those who are dehydrated or don’t have effective cooling. Temperatures in Portland, Oregon, are expected to hover around 94 F (34.4 C) throughout the weekend, according to the weather service. The current daily temperature records for May 13 and 14 stand at 92 F (33.3 C) and 91 F (32.8 C), dating from 1973 and 2014, respectively. Temperatures in the Seattle area could also meet or surpass daily records, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Jacob DeFlitch. The mercury could near 85 F (29.4 C) on Saturday and reach into the low 90s (32.2 C) on Sunday, he said. The unseasonal high temperatures could further flame the dozens of fires burning in Canada's western Alberta province, where officials have ordered evacuations and declared a state of emergency. Residents and officials in the Northwest have been trying to adjust to the likely reality of longer, hotter heat waves following the deadly “ heat dome ” weather phenomenon in 2021 that prompted record temperatures and deaths across the region. Elizabeth Romero and her three children were among those cooling off at a fountain in downtown Portland on Friday afternoon. “We decided to stop by ... until we all feel better," she said, adding that she plans to seek out shaded parks during the weekend. King County, home to Seattle, directed transportation operators such as bus drivers to let people ride for free if they're seeking respite from the heat or heading to a cooling center. The county's regional homeless authority said several cooling and day centers will be open across the county. Authorities also urged people to be wary of cold water temperatures, should they be tempted to take a river or lake swim to cool off. River temperatures are probably in the low- to mid-40s (4.4 to 7.2 C), National Weather Service meteorologist Higa said. Residents and officials in the Pacific Northwest have become more vigilant about heat wave preparations after some 800 people died in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia during the heat dome weather event in late June and early July 2021. The temperature at the time soared to an all-time high of 116 F (46.7 C) in Portland and smashed heat records in cities and towns across the region. Many of those who died were older people who lived alone. In response, Oregon passed a law requiring all new housing built after April 2024 to have air conditioning installed in at least one room. The law already prohibits landlords in most cases from restricting tenants from installing cooling devices in their rental units. Last summer, Portland launched a heat response program with the goal of installing portable heat pump and cooling units in low-income households, prioritizing residents who are older and live alone, as well as those with underlying health conditions. Local nonprofits participating in the program installed more than 3,000 units last year, according to the city's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. Officials in Multnomah County, home to Portland, said they weren’t planning on opening special cooling centers for now but are monitoring the forecast and can do so if needed. “This is the first significant event … and it is early for us,” said Chris Voss, the county’s director of emergency management. “We’re not seeing a situation where we are hearing that this is extremely dangerous. That being said, we don’t know if it’s going to drift.”

Train movement from Chattogram and Sylhet (up line) to Dhaka resumed on Saturday night around nine hours after the rail tracks got bent due to severe heat in Brahmanbaria.   Mehedhi Hasan Md Tarek, executive engineer of Akhaura Railway, said the train communication of Dhaka with Chattogram and Sylhet (up line) resumed around 8pm after fixing the train tracks.   “We ended the repair works of the bent tracks immediately along with fixing the fittings after the temperature fell down in the afternoon,” he said, adding that patrolling measures will be taken to ward off such incidents in future. Also Read: Container train derails in Brahmanbaria; Rail communication from Ctg, Sylhet to Dhaka snapped According to the railway, rail tracks may bend when temperature goes beyond 40 Degree Celsius. The tracks in the district got bent for the second time in a week.   Earlier, the train movement from Chattogram and Sylhet (up line) to Dhaka was suspended as the rail tracks got bent due to severe heat.   Brahmanbaria Railway Station’s Master Md Rafiqul Islam then said the tracks got bent at Dariyarpur in the outskirts of the city around 11am after Dhaka-bound Upakul Express from Nokhali crossed the area around 10 am, snapping rail communication.    However the train movement from Dhaka to Chattogram and Sylhet (down line) remained normal. Earlier on Thursday afternoon, seven bogies of a container train veered off the tracks in the Dariyarpur area while heading towards the capital from Chattogram due to severe heat around 12:50pm. The rail tracks became normal for movement around 16 hours later after it was fixed.

Thousands of frustrated Texans shivered in homes without power for a second day Thursday, most of them around booming Austin, and fading hopes of a quick fix stirred grim memories of a deadly 2021 blackout after an icy winter storm across the southern U.S. The freeze has been blamed for at least 10 traffic deaths on slick roads this week in Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. And even as Texas finally began thawing Thursday, a new Artic front from Canada was headed toward the northern U.S. and threatening New England with potentially the coldest weather in decades. Wind chills could dive below minus 50 (minus 45 Celsius). In Austin, city officials compared the damage from fallen trees and iced-over power lines to tornadoes as they came under mounting criticism for slow repairs and shifting timelines to restore power. “We had hoped to make more progress today,“ said Jackie Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy. ”And that simply has not happened." Across Texas more than 280,000 customers were without power Thursday night, down from 430,000 earlier in the day, according to PowerOutage.us. The failures were most widespread in Austin, where impatience was rising among 150,000 customers nearly two days after the electricity first went out, which for many also means no heat. Power failures have affected about 30% of customers in the city of nearly a million at any given time since Wednesday. By Thursday night, Austin officials backtracked on early estimates that power would be fully restored by Friday evening, saying the extent of the damage was worse than originally calculated and that they could no longer predict when all the lights may come back on. Allison Rizzolo, who lost power in Austin, told KEYE-TV that she wished there were more clarity from the city on what to do or expect. “I get that there’s a fine line between preparedness and panic, but I wish they’d been more aggressive in their communications,” Rizzolo said. For many Texans, it was the second time in three years that a February freeze — temperatures were in the 30s Thursday with wind chills below freezing — caused prolonged outages and uncertainty over when the lights would come back on. Unlike the 2021 blackouts in Texas, when hundreds of people died after the state’s grid was pushed to the brink of total failure because of a lack of generation, the outages in Austin this time were largely the result of frozen equipment and ice-burdened trees and limbs falling on power lines. But the differences were little comfort to Austin residents and businesses that also lost power for days two years ago. Read more: Flights canceled, at least 2 dead as ice storm freezes US Among those still without power Thursday was the Central Texas Food Bank, according to Travis County Judge Andy Brown, the county's top elected official. “They have 21 counties to serve. They've been down for at least three days now. There's a lot of need that they have,” Brown said. School systems in the Dallas and Austin area, plus many in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee, closed Thursday as snow, sleet and freezing rain continued to push through. In Austin, schools will not open until next week at the earliest. Hundreds more flights were canceled again in Texas, although not as many as in previous days. Airport crews battled ice to keep runways open. By Thursday morning, airlines had canceled more than 500 flights at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — more than a quarter of all flights scheduled for the day. Still, that was down from about 1,300 cancellations on Wednesday and more than 1,000 on Tuesday, according to FlightAware.com. Dozens more flights were canceled at Dallas Love Field and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Another wave of frigid weather in the U.S. is on the horizon, with an Arctic cold front expected to move from Canada into the northern Plains and Upper Midwest and sweep into the Northeast by Friday. In a briefing Thursday with the federal Weather Prediction Center, New Englanders were warned that wind chills — the combined effect of wind and cold air on exposed skin — in the minus 50s “could be the coldest felt in decades.” The strong winds and cold air will create wind chills “rarely seen in northern and eastern Maine,” according to an advisory from the National Weather Service office in Caribou, Maine. Jay Broccolo, director of weather operations at an observatory on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington — which for decades held the world record for the fastest wind gust — said Thursday that wind speeds could top 100 mph (160 kph). “We take safety really seriously in the higher summits," Broccolo said, “and this weekend’s forecast is looking pretty gnarly, even for our standards.”

Expect some reprieve from the high heat and humidity, as the weatherman has predicted showers in Bangladesh in the next 24 hours. “Light to moderate rain or thundershowers accompanied by temporary gusty winds is likely to occur at many places over Rangpur, Rajshahi, Mymensingh, Dhaka, Barishal, Chattogram and Sylhet divisions and at a few places over Khulna division with moderately heavy to heavy falls at places over the country,” the Met department said in its weather bulletin on Friday. Also read: Rains likely to quell heat in Bangladesh The Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) said a mild heatwave that is sweeping through the districts of Jashore and Satkhira may abate during the same time. Day temperature may fall slightly and night temperature may remain nearly unchanged over the country, according to the bulletin. Also read: Met office forecasts rain across Bangladesh The maximum temperature was recorded at 36 degree Celsius in both Satkhira and Jashore in the last 24 hours till 6am Friday. Meanwhile, the maximum rainfall was recorded at 67 mm in Syedpur.

As high temperatures continue to bake large parts of Bangladesh, the weather department has predicted showers across the country in the next 24 hours. "Light to moderate rain or thundershowers accompanied by temporary gusty winds is likely to occur at many places over Rangpur, Mymensingh and Sylhet divisions, and at one or two places over Rajshahi, Dhaka, Khulna, Barishal and Chattogram divisions with moderately heavy falls at places over northern part of the country", the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) said in its forecast on Tuesday. Also read: Met office forecasts rain across Bangladesh The Met office recorded the highest 59mm of rainfall in Mymensingh district in 24 hours till 6am on Tuesday. The mercury reached 36.5 degrees Celsius – the highest – in Rajshahi, while the minimum temperature was recorded at 25 degrees in Rangpur and Chattogram divisions. Meanwhile, the axis of monsoon trough runs through Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal to Assam across central parts of Bangladesh. Also read: Rains to drench Bangladesh in 24 hours Monsoon is less active over Bangladesh and weak to moderate elsewhere over the North Bay, as per the bulletin.

What's considered officially “dangerous heat” in coming decades will likely hit much of the world at least three times more often as climate change worsens, according to a new study. In much of Earth's wealthy mid-latitudes, spiking temperatures and humidity that feel like 103 degrees (39.4 degrees Celsius) or higher -- now an occasional summer shock — statistically should happen 20 to 50 times a year by mid-century, said a study Monday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. By 2100, that brutal heat index may linger for most of the summer for places like the U.S. Southeast, the study's author said. Also read: At least 14 potential heat deaths in Oregon after hot spell And it’s far worse for the sticky tropics. The study said a heat index considered “extremely dangerous” where the feels-like heat index exceeds 124 degrees (51 degrees Celsius) — now something that rarely happens — will likely strike a tropical belt that includes India one to four weeks a year by century's end. “So that’s kind of the scary thing about this,” said study author Lucas Zeppetello, a Harvard climate scientist. “That’s something where potentially billions of people are going to be exposed to extremely dangerous levels of heat very regularly. So something that's gone from virtually never happening before will go to something that is happening every year.” Zeppetello and colleagues used more than 1,000 computer simulations to look at the probabilities of two different levels of high heat -- heat indexes of 103 degrees (39.4 Celsius) and above 124 degrees (51 Celsius), which are dangerous and extremely dangerous thresholds according to the U.S. National Weather Service. They calculated for the years 2050 and 2100 and compared that to how often that heat happened each year across the world from 1979 to 1998. The study found a three- to ten-fold increase in 103-degree heat in the mid-latitudes even in the unlikely best-case scenario of global warming limited to only 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times -- the less stringent of two international goals. There's only a 5% chance for warming to be that low and that infrequent, the study found. What's more likely, according to the study, is that the 103-degree heat will steam the tropics “during most days of each typical year” by 2100. Also read: Europe broils in heat wave that fuels fires in France, Spain Chicago hit that 103 degree heat index level only four times from 1979 to 1998. But the study’s most likely scenario shows Chicago hitting that hot-and-sticky threshold 11 times a year by the end of the century. Heat waves are one of the new four horsemen of apocalyptic climate change, along with sea level rise, water scarcity and changes in the overall ecosystem, said Zeppetello, who did much of the research at University of Washington state during the warming-charged 2021 heat wave that shattered records and killed thousands. “Sadly, the horrific predictions shown in this study are credible,” climate scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who was not part of the study team, said in an email. “The past two summers have provided a window into our steamy future, with lethal heat waves in Europe, China, northwestern North America, India, the south-central U.S., the U.K., central Siberia, and even New England. Already hot places will become uninhabitable as heat indices exceed dangerous thresholds, affecting humans and ecosystems alike. Areas where extreme heat is now rare will also suffer increasingly, as infrastructure and living things are ill-adapted to the crushing heat.” The study focuses on the heat index and that’s smart because it’s not just heat but the combination with humidity that hurts health, said Harvard School of Public Health professor Dr. Renee Salas, who is an emergency room physician. “As the heat index rises, it becomes harder and harder to cool our bodies,” Salas, who wasn’t part of the research team, said in an email. “Heat stroke is a potentially deadly form of heat illness that occurs when body temperatures rise to dangerous levels.” The study is based on mathematical probabilities instead of other climate research that looks at what happens at various carbon pollution levels. Because of that, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann is more skeptical of this research. It also doesn’t take into account landmark U.S. climate legislation that President Joe Biden signed earlier this month or new efforts by Australia, he said. “The obstacles at this point are political and no statistical methods, regardless of how powerful or sophisticated can predict whether we will garner the political will to overcome them,” Mann said in an email. “But there is reason for cautious optimism.”

German businesses and public institutions should heat their offices no higher than 19 degrees Celsius (66.2 degrees Fahrenheit) this winter to help reduce the country's consumption of natural gas, Germany’s economy minister said Saturday. Germany, the European Union's biggest economy, is quickly trying to wean itself off using natural gas from Russia in response to Moscow's attack on Ukraine. However Germany uses more Russian gas imports than many other EU nations. Russia has already cut off gas exports to several EU nations, and officials fear Moscow will use the gas exports as a political weapon to get sanctions against Russia reduced — or even cut the exports to Europe off altogether in the winter, when demand is the highest. Read:Wildfire in southwestern France: 8,000 people evacuated Economy Minister Robert Habeck said while the EU's 27 countries have pledged to cut their gas use by 15% from August compared to the previous five-year average, Germany needs to reduce its consumption by 20%. Habeck is also proposing banning the heating of non-commercial private pools; switching off heating in common areas of public buildings, such as foyers; and switching off the lights on public billboards between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

 Oregon authorities are investigating four additional deaths potentially linked to last week’s scorching heat wave, bringing the total number of suspected hyperthermia deaths to 14. The Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office said Monday the designation of heat-related death is preliminary and requires further investigation. Multnomah County, which is home to Portland, recorded seven deaths suspected to be related to heat, the highest of any Oregon county. Also read: Dangerous Pacific Northwest heat wave suspected in 6th death Portland and Seattle set records Sunday for most consecutive days of high temperatures. In Portland, temperatures on Sunday rose above 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius) for the seventh day in a row, a record for the city for consecutive days above that mark. Further north in Seattle, the temperature rose to 91 F (32.8 C) by early afternoon, marking a record six days above 90 F (32.2 C). Temperatures neared the triple digits nearly all of last week in the Portland area, prompting officials to open emergency overnight shelters and cooling stations. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for both the Portland and Seattle regions lasting through late Sunday evening. Temperatures started to cool off on Monday as colder air from the Pacific blows in. Also read: Northwestern US heat wave could have hottest day on Tuesday Climate change is fueling longer heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, a region where weeklong heat spells were historically rare, according to climate experts. Residents and officials in the Northwest have been trying to adjust to the likely reality of longer, hotter heat waves following last summer’s deadly “heat dome” weather phenomenon that prompted record temperatures and deaths. About 800 people died in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia during that heat wave, which hit in late June and early July of 2021. The temperature hit an all-time high of 116 F (46.7 C) in Portland.

A mild heat wave is sweeping over Rajshahi, Rangpur and Sylhet divisions and  Tangail, Jashore and Chuadanga  districts and it may continue, Met office said. “However, light to moderate rain or thunder showers accompanied by temporary gusty wind is likely to occur at a few places over Khulna, Barishal, Chattogram, Rangpur and Sylhet divisions and at one or two places over Dhaka, Rajshahi and Mymensingh divisions with moderately heavy falls at isolated places over the country, “it said. Day and night temperatures may remain nearly unchanged over the country. Also read: Wildfires scorch parts of Europe amid extreme heat wave The low pressure area over Northwest Bay and adjoining Odisha-West Bengal coast persists.  Monsoon trough runs through Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, the centre of the low and thence Northeastwards to Assam across southern part of Bangladesh.  Also read: Heat wave, flooding leave multiple people dead in China Monsoon is fairly active over Bangladesh & moderate elsewhere over North Bay. The highest temperature was recorded 38.0 in Syedpur while lowest temperature was recorded 25.1 in Sylhet.    

As high temperatures continue to bake large swaths of Bangladesh, the weather department has predicted showers across the country in the next 24 hours. Light to moderate rain or thundershowers accompanied by temporary gusty wind is likely to occur at a few places over Rangpur, Khulna, Barishal, Chattogram, Mymensingh and Sylhet divisions and at one or two places over Rajshahi and Dhaka divisions, the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) said Saturday. A mild heatwave is sweeping through Rajshahi, Rangpur, and Sylhet divisions and Tangail, Jashore and Chuadanga districts. The spell may continue. Read: Rain likely to usher in pleasant weather It was a warm and humid day across the country today with the maximum temperature settling at 38 degrees Celsius in Rangpur's Sayedpur. The minimum temperature was recorded at 26 degrees Celsius in Chattogram's Rangamati.