Reuters on October 20, 2026 unveiled a sweeping data-driven investigation into the changing nature of extreme heat — and gave the phenomenon a new name: the "heat storm," a supersized heat wave so large that at its peak it covers at least 1% of the planet, roughly half the size of Canada — and these storms are now striking about 102 times a year, up from around five a year in the 1960s.
Illustration: Earth gripped by swirling bands of extreme heat. This is an AI-generated illustration, not real satellite imagery.
What Happened
In a series titled "The Age of Heat Storms," published on October 20, 2026, Reuters presented the results of an analysis that covered global temperatures for every hour of every day since 1960 — more than one million grid squares spanning the entire planet. The investigation was developed in consultation with two dozen climate researchers and meteorologists, and produced a new concept for understanding how heat waves have changed over a lifetime.
The core argument is a linguistic one with scientific backing: calling today's sprawling heat events "heat waves" is like calling a monsoon a rain shower. The old term no longer fits the scale of what is happening, so Reuters defined a new category. There is no universal definition of a heat wave, so in consultation with climate scientists, Reuters defined an ordinary heat wave as five or more consecutive days of abnormally high temperatures — a conservative benchmark — and reserved the term "heat storm" for the largest heat waves: those that at their peak cover at least 1% of the globe.
Applying that definition to six and a half decades of data revealed what the investigation calls a startling transformation. Heat storms were rare in the 1960s, when they averaged about five active storms per year. This decade, they have swarmed the planet, averaging about 102 a year. One of them caused this summer's deadly heat in Europe, according to the investigation.
Alongside the findings, Reuters launched a live Heat Storm Tracker — now a feature of the Reuters Climate Monitor — that names and follows heat storms in real time, the way tropical storms and hurricanes are named and tracked. The project also open-sourced its heat-wave tracking approach on GitHub so other researchers can conduct their own analyses using a uniform definition.
Background
The investigation reads almost like a natural history of a new weather species. It tells the story of the largest heat storm on record — Heat Storm Vera — which lasted 367 days over 2023–2024 and at its peak swept across nearly 85% of the globe. Reuters traced Vera's toll from a football player going to hospital in Texas, to Amazonian river dolphins dying in what the series describes as a "circus of death," to a cocoa farmer in Ivory Coast whose livelihood was destroyed.
Contrast that with the largest heat wave of the 1960s: it reached about 6% of the planet and drifted for 46 days over the Atlantic Ocean and parts of Latin America and West Africa. The difference between 6% and 85% is the story of the series.
The driving force is greenhouse gas emissions. 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, according to the investigation.
Another discovery is the heat storm "cascade" — heat storms that run consecutively, simultaneously, or both. The duration of these cascades swelled from an average of roughly two months in the 1960s to nine months in the early 2000s. Then, on July 6, 2008, a cascade started — and it still has not stopped. For more than 18 years straight, at least one heat storm has been roiling the planet, and often more than one, Reuters found.
The world is inside one right now. Heat Storm Raimundo, which broiled Europe and stoked massive wildfires in Spain and France this summer, has touched almost three-quarters of the planet's surface since its inception on February 28, 2026.
Not everyone loves the terminology. Reuters acknowledges that some scientists objected to the term "storm" because it has a distinct meteorological definition. The investigation answers that "storm" also has a common metaphorical meaning — "a serious disturbance of any element of nature," as Merriam-Webster defines it — and argues that meaning fits these heat events. The methodology was shaped with input from four researchers in particular: Alistair Hobday of Australia's CSIRO, Lukas Brunner of the University of Hamburg, Claudio Piani of the American University of Paris, and Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading.
Illustration: cracked, drought-stricken land under a blazing sun during a record heat storm. This is an AI-generated illustration, not a photograph of a real place.
Why It Matters
The investigation's most sobering claim is about what these events do — not just as isolated disasters, but as systemic forces reshaping the planet.
Heat has been estimated to kill almost half a million people a year, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Reuters — and naming events, he said, is "a powerful way for people to understand that something is happening." Heat waves, unlike hurricanes or floods, have no names and no tracking system; the Heat Storm Tracker is an attempt to give them one, which Leiserowitz called an important innovation that could help people track impacts and consequences.
The investigation found that heat storms and heat waves have driven lasting, systemic effects beyond individual catastrophes. They exacerbate droughts and intensify fires: from Chile to Europe, the largest conflagrations on record happened during heat storms. When they hit while a woman is pregnant, studies have found she is more likely to suffer everything from stillbirth to preeclampsia, a leading killer of expecting and post-partum women.
The series is also candid that warmer temperatures have ushered in benefits for some regions, at least for now. Siberia now produces almost as much wheat as Russia's traditional breadbasket near the Black Sea — 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.
As a communication device, the "heat storm" concept tries to solve a long-standing problem in climate coverage: scientists often frame global warming in terms of risks that arise if the planet's average temperature rises more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — an abstraction few people feel in their bones. "Heat waves are the connective tissue between the science of global warming and our everyday experience," the investigation argues, and supersized heat waves that used to be rare now swarm the planet. Giving them a name is an attempt to make the abstract visceral.
Illustration: a climate scientist studying a global heat anomaly tracking dashboard. This is an AI-generated illustration, not a photo of a real laboratory.
What Happens Next
The Heat Storm Tracker is now live as part of the Reuters Climate Monitor, which tracks daily anomalous temperatures worldwide. It will name and follow heat storms in real time — including Heat Storm Raimundo, which is still active and has already touched nearly three-quarters of the planet's surface since February.
The methodology behind the project has been open-sourced, which means independent researchers, journalists and institutions can adopt the same definitions and produce comparable results. The data journalists behind the work — Ben Welsh, Charles Szymanski and a colleague — said they began thinking seriously about the idea in 2024, and that this year Welsh rolled out the Reuters Climate Monitor that underpins the tracking system.
The open question is whether the term "heat storm" catches on. Some scientists' objections to the "storm" label suggest a debate ahead, much as earlier debates played out over terms like "polar vortex" or "atmospheric river" — phrases that began as scientific framing and ended up in everyday weather forecasts. Whether "heat storm" joins them will depend on whether forecasters, emergency planners and the public find it useful.
What the underlying data show is harder to argue with: six decades of hourly records, one million grid squares, and a planet where the largest heat events have gone from rare curiosities to a near-constant presence — a cascade that, since July 2008, has never once fully stopped.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a "heat storm"?
It is a term coined by a Reuters investigation published October 20, 2026, for a supersized heat wave: at its peak, a heat storm covers at least 1% of the planet, roughly half the size of Canada. An ordinary heat wave, in the investigation's conservative definition, is five or more consecutive days of abnormally high temperatures.
How much more common are heat storms now?
They averaged about five active storms per year in the 1960s; this decade they have averaged about 102 a year. One of them caused this summer's deadly heat in Europe. The average share of the planet covered by heat storms and heat waves has risen more than 12-fold since the 1960s.
What was the biggest heat storm on record?
Heat Storm Vera, which lasted 367 days over 2023–2024 and at its peak swept across nearly 85% of the globe. Reuters traced its impacts from a football player hospitalized in Texas, to Amazonian river dolphins dying in a "circus of death," to an Ivory Coast cocoa farmer whose livelihood was destroyed.
Are we in a heat storm right now?
Yes, according to the Reuters tracker. Heat Storm Raimundo, which broiled Europe and stoked massive wildfires in Spain and France this summer, has touched almost three-quarters of the planet's surface since its inception on February 28, 2026.
Why name heat waves at all?
Naming events is "a powerful way for people to understand that something is happening," Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication told Reuters. Heat has been estimated to kill almost half a million people a year, yet heat waves — unlike hurricanes — have never had names or a real-time tracking system. Reuters' new Heat Storm Tracker aims to change that.
Sources
- Reuters — "Meet the heat storm: 7 takeaways from our investigation that gave supersized heat waves a new name" (October 20, 2026)
- Reuters — "Giant heat storms are scorching the Earth: this is the story of the biggest one on record" (October 20, 2026)
- Reuters — methodology explainer, "How and why we developed the age of heat storms" (October 20, 2026)
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