00:00So we have taken you now farther south where the fire threat is increasing with building heat.
00:06Now this large fire at Riverside, California, is reportedly fueled by strong winds this week.
00:11We're dealing with, again, a really dry setup.
00:15The winds won't be terribly active at all times, but the dryness is persistent.
00:19The heat is there. The dew points are really, really low.
00:22So this is a record-shattering heat wave, and there are areas, more and more cities every day in the
00:29southwest,
00:29breaking monthly March record highs.
00:33Some areas may be flirting with April record highs in March, which is very difficult to do.
00:38So this is an extreme heat wave on March standards in the southwest.
00:42Temperatures in the inland areas 15 to 30 degrees above historical averages.
00:45The relief that you can find will be right along the coastline.
00:48Areas like San Diego, the city of San Diego, avoiding records most days,
00:52but you go just a little bit inland and you're going to find a big clustering of them.
00:55Look at all these dots here.
00:56These are locations with record high temperatures that will be threatened.
01:00Many of these are official climate sites.
01:01Some of these are kind of secondary places with unofficial records.
01:04Regardless, much of the west, very significant heat.
01:07This is AccuWeather's Heat Wave Severity Index.
01:10So it's a product that we've rolled out a few years ago, and it's kind of location-specific.
01:16One location to the next will have different standards.
01:18So it's kind of baked into the local city climatology.
01:22And what we want you to see here is that in Los Angeles, for downtown L.A.,
01:27by the time we get past the next several days here,
01:29we expect to have 15 units here for the AccuWeather Heat Wave Severity Index in Los Angeles.
01:35And that would be a five-day heat wave, March 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th.
01:40Well above average temperatures.
01:42And the last time, objectively, using our system, that we had a heat wave this pronounced or longer
01:47actually was back in September, the early fall of 2024.
01:51So this individual heat wave is actually bringing more sustained, prolonged heat
01:55than any point last summer in L.A.
01:58A lot of the time, it's the early or late part of the summer
02:01when we get into big-time heat there right along the coastline
02:04as it's tough to get away from the ocean influence in the middle of the summer there.
02:08But again, it varies year to year.
02:10And persistent heat is out there through Thursday.
02:13Let's look at Thursday's record-challenging highs.
02:15We're going to smash daily records in Sacramento.
02:17Now, the record high for downtown L.A., specifically for March 19th, is 97 from 1997.
02:24We'll probably tie that.
02:25The monthly record high is 99 from the late 1800s, by the way, in downtown L.A.
02:30Phoenix, 106, smashing not just daily record highs as represented here for the data for March 19th.
02:36We're going to smash a monthly record high a few days in a row in Phoenix.
02:41Pretty incredible.
02:41Denver should also break a monthly record high.
02:44It'll break the daily record by 3 degrees.
02:46Dallas, a little shy of records on Thursday, by 5 degrees.
02:49Record high 95 will be around 90 there.
02:50But into Friday, unseasonable heat across the southwest.
02:55And Friday, the south-central, even parts of the central plains, even some sections of the Midwest,
03:00begin to climb well above historical averages.
03:03So there we are Friday.
03:04L.A. tying a daily record for the 20th of March, matching 1997.
03:07But Vegas, 100 degrees.
03:09That should smash a daily record by 10 degrees.
03:12Download the AccuWeather app for the absolute latest.
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