By Liliana Salgado

PHOENIX (Reuters) – The desert city of Phoenix, Arizona, has endured 113 consecutive days of temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) this year, leading to hundreds of heat-related deaths and even more acres burned by wildfires across the state, officials said.

The city of 1.6 million, the largest in the Sonoran Desert, experienced its warmest summer on record, breaking the previous record set in 2023 by nearly two degrees, the National Weather Service said.

The streak of 113 days reached last week broke the previous record set in Phoenix in 1993, which was 76 days with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It’s very rare that we have something like this, especially when we have two summers that break records like this,” said Matt Salerno, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Phoenix.

Heat has killed 256 people in Phoenix’s Maricopa County so far this year and is suspected of causing 393 other deaths, according to state records. The county had a record 645 heat-related deaths last year.

“It is too early to predict how the total numbers in 2024 will compare to 2023,” said Nailea Leon, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Public Health Department. She added that the number of heat-related deaths in 2024 and the number of suspected deaths were lower than in 2023, but that summer was not over yet.

About half of the deaths are among homeless people, the most vulnerable group in the region.

The number of deaths peaked in July, when temperatures in Phoenix regularly reached 118 degrees Fahrenheit, a trend climate scientists attribute to global warming caused by fossil fuel pollution.

According to the Arizona State Climate Office, the city has had an average of 40 days with temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit or higher over the past five years, compared to about five days at the beginning of the last century.

According to Erinanne Saffell, director of the office, the extreme heat has resulted in more acreage being burned by wildfires across the state in 2024 than last year.

A climate-related combination of record winter precipitation and summer heat has fueled wildfires around Los Angeles in recent weeks.

(Reporting by Liliana Salgado in Phoenix, additional reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; Editing by Donna Bryson, Aurora Ellis and Rashmi Aich)