14 DAY TRIAL // While large swaths of North America are experiencing the coldest winter in more than two decades, people living in Australia do not know where else to turn to to escape the massive wave of heat currently scorching the eastern parts of the country.
The current heat wave continues a trend that began last year. Climate scientists say that 2013 was the hottest year on record in Australia, with the peak temperatures being recorded between December 27, and January 4, 2014. During the first four days of the New Year, temperature records were broken over 8.8 percent of the continent's total surface.
The image above shows temperature deviations from the average, and was created from data sent back to Earth by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on the NASA Terra satellite. The spacecraft flies in low orbit around Earth.
The dataset reveals that regions in and around Queensland and New South Wales were the worst affected by the heat. The temperatures MODIS reveals are not those in the atmosphere, but those people would experience if touching the ground. The two are different, but not by much, experts say.
These observations again show the extreme effects that global warming can have in throwing Earth's climate off-balance, with different repercussions affecting different areas of the globe.