BERNAMA – By the time you read this article, the heat that has been scorching parts of Malaysia, particularly the states of Kedah, Penang, Perlis and Sabah, since February would have hopefully subsided.
But that doesn’t mean that the worst is over.
In fact, scientists are now reportedly worried about how ocean heat has been breaking temperature records every day for more than a year. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service in Europe, the average global sea surface temperature (SST) reached a new monthly high of 21.07 degrees Celcius (°C) in March.
This comes even as the El Nino weather cycle – which, at 2°C above SST, has been one of the strongest – peaked in January and is now on its way out.
Various theories have been floated for all this heat, ranging from an underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga to the recent reduction in aerosol pollution from container ships, which is thought to have had a cooling effect on the atmosphere.
Scientists are now struggling to understand how this will affect climate patterns for the rest of the year as warmer ocean temperatures tend to fuel stronger storms, and there is also the cooler La Nina weather cycle on the horizon.
So, is this year’s heat level during Malaysia’s usual dry and hot season, which traditionally begins at the start of the year in the northern part of Peninsular Malaysia,“unprecedented”?
It would certainly seem so, going by the daily heat alerts sent out by Malaysia’s Meteorological Department (MetMalaysia). On April 7, there were 48 localities across the nation either under a Level 2 (orange) or Level 1 (yellow) alert.
But according to associate professor Dr Yusri Yusup, while the hot weather conditions in Malaysia this year have been more prolonged than in the past four years, the heat isn’t “unprecedented”.
The atmospheric physicist at Universiti Sains Malaysia has dug into airport weather station data from April 2019 to March 2024 on which to base his analysis.
Referring to MetMalaysia’s classification for heatwaves and analysing the airport weather station data, he said as at March this year, he would not classify any days as “heatwave days” because there were no three consecutive days with temperatures above 37°C.
Yellow is for Level 1 alerts of daily maximum temperatures between 35°C and 37°C, orange is for Level 2 alerts of daily maximum temperatures between 37°C and 40°C, and red is for extreme temperatures exceeding 40°C.
All the alerts are for high temperatures over three consecutive days.
“Instances of the ‘Careful’ status (Level 1) were found more frequently in 2024 than in the same quarter from 2019 to 2023.
“Although it might not be statistically significant to call it ‘unprecedented’, hot weather conditions are more prolonged this year than in the past four years,” he said in an email reply to queries from The Star.
The airports involved are Penang International Airport; the Air Force base in Butterworth, Penang; Kuala Lumpur International Airport; Senai International Airport, Johor; Kota Kinabalu International Airport; and Kuching International Airport.
These weather stations, he stressed, are located outside cities and should thus be free from the “urban heat island effect” that would exacerbate the already warm conditions. Yusri cautioned that he had only looked at the data at these specific places up to the end of March this year.
As of April 4 this year, MetMalaysia had issued 748 heat alerts for various areas nationwide, already surpassing last year’s total of 397 alerts. According to the Health Ministry, so far two deaths have been attributed to heatstroke.
And Malaysia is not alone. The rest of southeast Asia is simmering too. Thousands of schools across the Philippines were closed, there were desperate attempts in Thailand to bring on rain by cloud-seeding – which, by the way, only increases the likelihood of rain by 10 per cent to 15 per cent – and the media in Singapore were full of stories about temperature records being broken. – Sim Leoi Leoi
