page_title: Natural disaster
section_title: Heat waves
hierarchical_section_title: Natural disaster / Meteorological disasters / Heat waves
caption_attribution_description: English: Thunderstorm cloud - Cumulonimbus in the western desert of United States
context_page_description: A natural disaster is a major adverse event resulting from natural processes of the Earth; examples are floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, and other geologic processes. A natural disaster can cause loss of life or damage property, and typically leaves some economic damage in its wake, the severity of which depends on the affected population's resilience and also on the infrastructure available.
  An adverse event will not rise to the level of a disaster if it occurs in an area without vulnerable population. In a vulnerable area, however, such as Nepal during the 2015 earthquake, an earthquake can have disastrous consequences and leave lasting damage, which can require years to repair.
  Societies are becoming significantly less vulnerable to extreme weather events. The death toll from natural disasters has declined over 90 percent since the 1920s, according to the International Disaster Database, even as the total human population on Earth quadrupled, and temperatures rose 1.3 degrees centigrade. In the 1920s, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters while in the 2010s, just 400,000 did.
context_section_description: A heat wave is a period of unusually and excessively hot weather. The worst heat wave in recent history was the European Heat Wave of 2003. A summer heat wave in Victoria, Australia, created conditions which fuelled the massive bushfires in 2009. Melbourne experienced three days in a row of temperatures exceeding 40 °C (104 °F) with some regional areas sweltering through much higher temperatures. The bushfires, collectively known as "Black Saturday", were partly the act of arsonists. The 2010 Northern Hemisphere summer resulted in severe heat waves, which killed over 2,000 people. It resulted in hundreds of wildfires which caused widespread air pollution, and burned thousands of square miles of forest.
caption: A classic anvil-shaped, and clearly-developed Cumulonimbus incus
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