India’s heat
Every reading against its published limit. Every gap named.
1 March to 15 July
OUT OF SEASON — the season is shut; this is the record
48.3°C
the hottest reading in this record · Jodhpur, Rajasthan · 27 May 2024
Above IMD’s severe threshold
IMD: 45°C is a heat wave anywhere, 47°C is severe. Limit broken by 1.3°C.
14 grid points, ECMWF ERA5 / ERA5-Land reanalysis. What counts as heat.
The one that is coming, not the one that came
Air kills more. The river is worse. But heat is the only situation on this site whose death toll more than doubled in a single year — and it is the one nobody can move away from, insulate against, or filter.
A heatwave has no plume, no smell and no photograph. It leaves no damage to survey. It kills indoors, at night, in people who were already ill, and it is recorded as something else.
8 of these 14 cities set their all-time record in 2024. Not spread across thirty-five years. One year.
Who it kills
1,832 people in 2024. It was 804 the year before.
1,832
deaths recorded as heat or sunstroke, 2024
The second largest killer in India’s national table of deaths from forces of nature, after lightning.
+127.9%
in one year
The largest rise of any cause in the table. Heat’s share of all such deaths went from 12.5% to 23.2%.
Counted or measuredModelled
1,832 is what was filed, not what happened. Heat rarely reaches a death certificate. It kills through heart failure, kidney failure and stroke, in people who were already ill. This number is a floor, not an estimate.
Every death from a force of nature, India, 2024
Lightning kills more than everything else combined — 2,825 deaths, and almost never a story. And 1,626 deaths (20.6%) have no named cause at all.
Nobody publishes heat-related hospital admissions, lost work or school days missed in India. Those are the numbers a city needs to plan with, and they do not exist publicly.
What counts as heat
India does not define a heatwave by a temperature. It defines it by a distance from normal — and the temperature it starts from depends on where you are.
A day is a heat wave when the maximum clears its local floor and stands 4.5°C above the normal for that place and date. 6.5°C above makes it severe.
The floor by zone. Applying the plains figure to Chennai would under-count every coastal city on this page.
There is also an absolute rule, with no reference to normal: 45°C anywhere is a heat wave, 47°C is severe.
So the same 41°C afternoon is a heatwave in March and an ordinary day in June. That is the point, not a loophole. A body acclimatised to June heat is not the body that meets it in March.
A departure needs a normal. Each city gets its own, computed from 1991-2020: for every calendar day, the mean maximum over a ±7-day window. About 450 samples per day.
A departure is meaningless against somebody else's normal. Chennai's normal and Jodhpur's are 10 C apart.
Reproducible, not quoted. Because the normal comes from the same archive as the readings, you can recompute every departure on this page from the source. It is not IMD’s published departure and does not claim to be.
IMD declares for a subdivision on two or more stations. These are single grid points, so these are days MEETING the temperature criteria at each location, not IMD declarations.
So every figure here is days meeting IMD’s criteria at this location, never heatwave days declared by IMD. Different quantities. The second is not ours to publish.
And it is modelled. ERA5 reanalysis — a model constrained by observations, not a station thermometer. An IMD station series would outrank this, not confirm it. Reanalysis also smooths extremes hardest at the tail this subject lives in, and contains no urban heat island.
A grid point is not a city. Fourteen grid points are not a country.
Sources. Criteria: India Meteorological Department — heat wave criteria. Readings: Open-Meteo ERA5 archive. Deaths: Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India 2024, Table 1.0 — Number and Share of Accidental Deaths due to Forces of Nature and Other Causes, 2023 & 2024.
Fourteen cities
The desert, the plateau, the Gangetic plain, both coasts and one hill station. Each measured against the threshold for its own zone.
Sorted by the hottest reading each city has recorded since 1991. The tick marks IMD’s severe threshold, 47°C.
8 of 14 set their record in 2024. All requested stations answered.
Last season, city by city
The sum of qualifying days across all 14 stations. It is a count of station-days, NOT a national number of heatwave days — those are different quantities and this site does not blur them. 18 station-days across 14 cities, the last completed season.
What is rising
Not the afternoons. The nights.
Five measures, the first eighteen seasons against the last, counted across all 14 cities. The pale bar is cities where it rose, the grey where it did not move, the dark where it fell.
Dry-bulb heat is not the measure that is rising. Humid heat and warm nights are. Across these 14 stations, the number that moves most consistently upward is not the hottest afternoon — it is the number of nights that never fall below 28°C, and the number of days whose apparent temperature clears 45°C. Peak daytime maxima are close to flat at most stations and fall at some.
Counted as cities, not averaged. How many of the 14 stations move each way between the first and second halves of the record. Published as a count of stations rather than a national average, because averaging 14 grid points does not produce a national trend.
Why the afternoons are the wrong thing to watch
- It is not evidence that heat is not intensifying. Three of the four things that make heat dangerous are not dry-bulb maximum: humidity, night-time recovery, and duration.
- A reanalysis smooths local extremes hardest at exactly the tail this metric lives in, and contains no urban heat island for cities that have doubled their built area.
- A grid point is not a city, and 14 grid points are not a country.
- IMD's own declarations are made on station data across subdivisions and are a different quantity from this one.
And who is looking
Lighter bars are months inside the season. Peak 78,038 in Jun 2024, floor 5,174 in Feb 2026 — 15.1×. Attention peaks with the season and is gone by August. NCRB publishes the death count the following year, when nobody is looking.
100 items from 55 publishers. Reporting is tagged as reporting; no figure here came from a headline.
Read the 40 most recent items
- One Day Of Extreme Heat Causes 3,400 Excess Deaths Across India, Study EstimatesNDTV · 29 May 2026
- Experts explain | Why India struggles to count heatwave deaths as climate change intensifiesThe Indian Express · 07 Jul 2026
- Workers Are Dying in the Heat in IndiaJacobin · 25 Jun 2026
- Too hot, too humid: why the sustained heatwave in India and Pakistan is so dangerousThe Conversation · 28 May 2026
- Depending on Their Duration, Heatwaves May Be Causing 3,400 to 30,000 Excess Deaths Every Year in India: StudyTheWire.in · 30 May 2026
- 18 killed, 2 children found dead in hot car as France reels under severe heatwaveIndia Today · 23 Jun 2026
- DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-gridsCarbon Brief · 29 May 2026
- India’s poorest states could bear the brunt of severe heatwavesNature · 27 May 2026
- Estimating heatwave-induced excess mortality in India's districtsFrontiers · 11 May 2026
- Climate change triples chance of deadly 2026 South Asia pre-monsoon heatwave: Reportnews - Mongabay · 21 May 2026
- India's deadly heatwaves are getting worse: Here's what extreme heat actually does to your bodyThe Times of India · 11 Jun 2026
- Heatwaves may have driven ozone exposure linked to 26,500 deaths in India in 2024, finds IIT studyDown To Earth · 16 Jun 2026
- Europe heatwave 2026: France reports 30% rise in deaths as temperatures shatter recordsThe Indian Express · 04 Jul 2026
- 1,000 More Deaths In France's Worst Heatwave, Total Rises To Over 4,000NDTV · 28 Jun 2026
- Europe heatwave linked to over 10,000 excess deaths in late JuneIndia Today · 17 Jul 2026
- Heatwave Across India to Abate Soon But Leaves Trail of Deaths, Power Demand Hits Record PeakTheWire.in · 27 Apr 2026
- Europe’s deadly heatwave: 40 drown in France. Which countries are worst hit and what’s causing it?The Indian Express · 23 Jun 2026
- Europe heatwave sends urgent warning to India as heat deaths riseIndia Today · 29 Jun 2026
- France heat wave causes 1,000 extra deaths as WHO warns EuropeIndia Today · 28 Jun 2026
- Europe bakes under deadly 44°C heat dome; death toll mounts, schools shutIndia Today · 24 Jun 2026
- France heatwave kills 18 as temperatures hit record highs across EuropeThe Indian Express · 23 Jun 2026
- Germany records over 5,100 heat deaths as Europe reels under record-breaking summerThe Times of India · 09 Jul 2026
- Extreme heatwave in Europe: Seven dead in France, temperature shatters record in UKThe Indian Express · 26 May 2026
- France records around 1,000 excess deaths during record heatwaveIndia Today · 28 Jun 2026
- India records over 300 suspected heatstroke cases as summer temperatures spikeReuters · 22 May 2026
- Heatwave, deaths and political turmoil: France's scorching summer worsensIndia Today · 01 Jul 2026
- India records 3,400 per day excess heat deathsNagaland Post · 11 Jun 2026
- Exceptionally early heat wave shatters records, brings deaths in EuropeThe Times of India · 27 May 2026
- HEAT TOLL IS HIGHER THAN YOU THINKMumbai Mirror · 05 Jun 2026
- Europe bakes under deadly ‘Omega’ heatwave as temperatures shatter records, death toll risesTelegraph India · 24 Jun 2026
- 40 drown in France trying to cool off as Europe bakes under record heatIndia Today · 24 Jun 2026
- What makes 43°C in Europe more unbearable than 43°C in India?Firstpost · 30 Jun 2026
- Heatwave Intensity, Frequency and Hotspot Extent Have Increased in India Over the Last 26 Years: StudyTheWire.in · 18 Apr 2026
- Chhattisgarh heatwave turns deadly for wildlife: Over 700 birds, bats, animals deadIndia Today · 28 May 2026
- Over 1,300 dead in Europe: How 'Omega Block' turned a heatwave into a continent-wide death trapThe Times of India · 29 Jun 2026
- 17 deaths in Nagpur amid heatwave under scrutiny; cops say extreme temperature may be culpritThePrint · 27 May 2026
- Prepare for above-normal heatwave days to prevent deaths, Centre tells stateslivemint.com · 24 May 2026
- Heatwave tightens grip on Europe: Over 20 weather-linked deaths in France & Germany, red alerts issuedThe Times of India · 22 Jun 2026
- Severe heatwave grips Europe; over 1,300 deaths, wildfires rage across continentIndia Today · 28 Jun 2026
- Heatwaves and humans: When does it become too hot to handle? Explainedlivemint.com · 24 May 2026
Publishers: India Today (15) · The Indian Express (8) · The Times of India (7) · TheWire.in (4) · Down To Earth (4) · livemint.com (4) · Business Standard (3) · NDTV (2) · Nature (2) · ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2) · 아시아경제 (2) · Al Jazeera (2) · CNN (2) · FACTLY (2) · Jacobin (1) · The Conversation (1) · Carbon Brief (1) · Frontiers (1) · news - Mongabay (1) · Reuters (1) · Nagaland Post (1) · Mumbai Mirror (1) · Telegraph India (1) · Firstpost (1) · ThePrint (1) · Mahabahu.com (1) · theweek.in (1) · Vibes Of India (1) · Outlook India (1) · Gulf Today (1) · ESG News.earth (1) · The Independent (1) · The Straits Times (1) · weekendargus.co.za (1) · tabla.com.sg (1) · News18 (1) · The Cool Down (1) · Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (1) · The Washington Post (1) · AP News (1) · Health Policy Watch (1) · BBC (1) · ET HealthWorld (1) · World Weather Attribution (1) · VOA - Voice of America English News (1) · Anadolu Ajansı (1) · The Water Diplomat (1) · Frontline Magazine (1) · PBS (1) · The Swaddle (1) · Business Today (1) · Vajiram & Ravi (1) · India.com (1) · AccuWeather (1) · Medical Xpress (1)
Who is watching
India runs a daily satellite heat outlook. Its layer list makes the same argument this page does.
India's own heat product does not measure heat with temperature alone. Two of its four layers add moisture. Two express the answer as a departure from normal. That is the official instrument agreeing, in its design, with the two things this page had to compute for itself.
What it covers, read from its own index
1,027 days, 2022-04-29 to 2026-06-19. Read from the application’s date index, not described — a portal that stopped publishing and one that is current look identical from outside. This one is current. It serves map images, so no reading on this page comes from it.
Source. Bhuvan, National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO — Heatwave / Hot Weather Outlook.
What you can do
Heat kills the people who cannot leave it.
The season starts 1 March
Not May, when the headlines arrive. Construction and delivery workers, street vendors, anyone whose room does not cool at night — they are exposed from the first week.
Ask for the plan
Cities write Heat Action Plans. Ask if yours has one, whether it names shaded spaces and water points near your ward, and whether outdoor workers were consulted. A plan nobody can find is not a plan.
Shade is infrastructure
A tree over a bus stop does more for a waiting body than any advisory. It is the one place a heat page and a forest page meet.
Every figure here is public, dated and reproducible from the source named beside it — including the ones that do not support the argument.
This is what we are doing.
It is not enough.
The work against this reading
Eco Action builds the small green infrastructure a city actually has room for — over seventy butterfly parks and over twenty herb gardens across Delhi NCR. In one Vasant Kunj park, green cover went from 5% to 90% over a decade.
And why it is not a reply
That is one park, and heat is regional. Shade cools the body standing under it and nothing past that: it does not lower the 48.3°C in this archive and it did not prevent the 1,832 deaths recorded in 2024. A canopy is a real intervention at the scale of a bus stop. The reading is at the scale of a country.
Once a month, what these numbers did.
One email. What the six readings did that month, what moved and what did not, and what we did about it. Nothing else, ever — no appeals between digests, and your address is never shared with anybody.
Confirm by email before anything is stored. Every message carries a one-click link to stop them.