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If you live in much of California or the southwestern U.S., you've likely been muttering to yourself, it's hot in here.

Last week, a heat dome that centered on that region, but that was expected to expand as far east as Mississippi and as far north as southern Montana,

created unprecedented mid-March temperatures that teetered into the triple digits in some places.

To demystify this early heat wave and its links to climate change, we have Andrea Thompson,

senior desk editor for Life Sciences here at Siam.

Thanks for joining us, Andrea.

Thanks for having me.

So spring just started, and much of the southwest and parts of the western United States are

cooking, they're baking. What's going on? Yeah. So, you know, this is following on a march that

has been really wild weather-wise in general, you know, March is the beginning of spring. So this is

a transitional

weather season anyway as the sun comes up and the jet stream over the U.S. kind of shifts.

So you have warm and cold air masses colliding.

You get things like tornadoes and extreme weather, which we've seen.

What's happening here is this is an area of high pressure or a ridge, in neurology speak,

and it is incredibly intense, especially for March.

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