U.N. weather agency warns January 2026 was a ‘month of extremes’ as heat, floods and cold hit worldwide

On Australia’s south coast, the air above the concrete shimmered as thermometers in Ceduna hit 49.5 degrees Celsius (121.1 Fahrenheit) on Jan. 26, the town’s hottest day on record. Half a world away, families in central Mozambique clung to rooftops as weeks of torrential rain turned neighborhoods into brown lakes and washed away bridges and crops. In North America, Arctic air pushed deep into the United States, coating highways in ice, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and driving wind chills to levels forecasters called life‑threatening.

These were not isolated freak storms, the United Nations’ weather agency says, but part of a single, turbulent picture.

In a statement on Feb. 3, the World Meteorological Organization described January 2026 as a “month of extremes,” marked by “intense heat and fire, record‑breaking cold and snow, devastating rainfall and flooding impacting countries in every region of the world.”

“The number of people affected by weather and climate‑related disasters continues to rise, year by year, and the terrible human impacts of this have been apparent on a day‑by‑day basis this January,” WMO Secretary‑General Celeste Saulo said. She linked the cluster of disasters to a warming climate and renewed a push for universal early‑warning systems.

A hotter planet in the background

The organization’s warning comes against a backdrop of record global warmth. WMO confirmed in mid‑January that 2025 was one of the three warmest years ever measured, with the planet about 1.44 degrees Celsius (2.59 Fahrenheit) hotter than in the late 19th century. The years 2023, 2024 and 2025 are all in the top three in major datasets, and 2024 stands alone as the hottest year recorded so far, at about 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre‑industrial levels.

Taken together, the three‑year period from 2023 to 2025 averaged around 1.48 degrees above the pre‑industrial baseline, the first time a multi‑year stretch has effectively reached the 1.5‑degree mark referenced in the Paris climate agreement.

Natural climate cycles are still operating. A strong El Niño helped push up global temperatures in 2023 and early 2024, while conditions have been shifting toward La Niña, which typically brings cooler global averages. But WMO says those swings now play out on top of a steadily rising baseline driven by greenhouse gas emissions.

“Long‑term temperature increase is fueling more frequent extreme weather,” the agency said, adding that short‑lived La Niña episodes “do not reverse the long‑term trend.”

Southern Africa’s “perfect storm” floods

Nowhere were January’s impacts more visible than in southern Africa, where weeks of heavy rain from mid‑December into late January swelled rivers and overwhelmed dams from Mozambique to South Africa.

In Mozambique, the government’s disaster management institute reported that about 650,000 people had been affected and hundreds of thousands displaced as of late January. Roughly 30,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. The flooding cut off roads and bridges, inundated fields and damaged health facilities in what officials described as the country’s worst flood disaster in a generation. National counts put the death toll at at least 146 people there alone, with more than 200 fatalities across the wider region.

Neighboring South Africa formally classified the situation as a national disaster on Jan. 18 and 19, covering flooding across five provinces, including Limpopo and Mpumalanga. Authorities reported dozens of deaths and widespread damage to homes and infrastructure. Parts of Kruger National Park were evacuated, with about 600 tourists and staff moved to safety as rivers burst their banks.

A rapid analysis by the World Weather Attribution consortium, a group of climate scientists from several institutions, concluded that human‑caused climate change and La Niña conditions together created a “perfect storm.” The study estimated that the most intense downpours were around 40% heavier than they would have been in a pre‑industrial climate, with some locations receiving more than a typical year’s worth of rain in a matter of days.

The floods also raised public health concerns. The World Health Organization’s Africa office warned of heightened risks of cholera and other water‑borne diseases in crowded displacement camps and in communities where drinking water and sanitation systems were damaged.

WMO singled out Mozambique and South Africa as early adopters of the U.N.’s Early Warnings for All initiative, which aims to ensure that every person on Earth is covered by a warning system for hazardous weather by 2027. The South African Weather Service issued its highest‑level “disruptive rain” alerts, and authorities say improved forecasts and communication helped limit the death toll compared with some past disasters, even as economic losses rose.

Flames in Chile’s center‑south

On the other side of the globe, parts of central‑southern Chile burned.

Beginning around Jan. 16, dozens of wildfires erupted in the Biobío and Ñuble regions, fanned by high temperatures, dry vegetation and strong winds. Chile’s national disaster service, SENAPRED, reported that a state of catastrophe was declared as blazes spread through forested hills into peri‑urban neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities such as Concepción, Penco and Lirquén.

By late January, officials said at least 21 people had been killed. More than 50,000 residents were evacuated, helped by 121 emergency alerts broadcast directly to mobile phones. Hundreds of homes and other structures were destroyed, and at one point 75 separate fires were burning simultaneously.

WMO said similar conditions — high temperatures, prolonged dryness and strong winds — also fueled fires across the Andes in southern Argentina.

The country has experienced devastating fire seasons in recent years, including in 2017 and 2023, and scientists have warned that a warmer climate increases the number of days with “fire weather,” when hot, dry and windy conditions allow flames to spread rapidly. Land‑use patterns and the expansion of housing into forested areas also play a role by putting more people and property in harm’s way.

Australia’s record heat

In Australia, two major heatwaves swept across large parts of the country during January, particularly in the south and southeast.

The late‑month event peaked on Jan. 26, a national holiday. The Bureau of Meteorology reported that Ceduna, on South Australia’s west coast, reached 49.5 degrees Celsius, a new record for that location. Unofficial readings and local reports noted temperatures at or near 50 degrees in some inland towns, and many sites in South Australia, northwest Victoria, inland New South Wales and southwest Queensland exceeded 45 degrees.

In parts of inland New South Wales, daytime highs remained above 40 degrees for seven or eight days in a row, the longest such run since the 1930s, according to national broadcasters citing meteorologists. Adelaide logged its hottest Australia Day on record.

The intense heat drove up fire danger, contributing to large bushfires in Victoria and other states, and prompted health warnings for older residents, people with existing medical conditions and outdoor workers. Authorities urged people to stay hydrated, avoid strenuous activity in the hottest part of the day and check on vulnerable neighbors.

An earlier heatwave, from Jan. 5 to 10, was analyzed by World Weather Attribution, which concluded that climate change had made the event about 1.6 degrees Celsius hotter than it would have been without human influence. WMO noted that, according to assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, human‑caused warming has already increased the frequency and intensity of heatwaves since the 1950s.

Deep freeze in a warming world

While southern continents sweltered, parts of the Northern Hemisphere shivered.

In the last week of January, a disrupted polar vortex allowed frigid Arctic air to plunge southward over Canada and the United States. The resulting winter storm brought heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain to a broad swath of North America. Hundreds of thousands of customers lost electricity as ice and wind tore down power lines, and thousands of flights were delayed or canceled.

The U.S. National Weather Service warned that for some areas, particularly in the central and eastern states, the outbreak could bring “the longest duration of cold in several decades,” with dangerously low wind chills persisting into early February. Local authorities reported multiple deaths across several states, though national totals varied as reports were consolidated.

Elsewhere, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia saw more than two meters (over 6.5 feet) of snow in the first half of January, on top of 3.7 meters that fell in December, burying cars and buildings and bringing the regional capital, Petropavlovsk‑Kamchatsky, close to a standstill. In Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, snow depth reached 1.7 meters on Feb. 3, the highest in four decades. Western Europe, from Ireland and the United Kingdom to Portugal and parts of the Mediterranean, was hit by successive Atlantic storms that brought heavy rain, strong winds and coastal flooding, prompting “danger to life” warnings from several national meteorological services.

WMO said the cold spells did not contradict the broader warming trend. While global cold extremes have become less frequent and intense since the mid‑20th century, regional outbreaks can still occur when large‑scale atmospheric patterns, such as the jet stream or polar vortex, become more wavy and allow Arctic air to move south.

Early warnings and what comes next

The World Meteorological Organization and its partners have been pushing since 2022 to extend early‑warning coverage to every country through the Early Warnings for All initiative, co‑led with the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. The effort is built on four pillars: understanding risks, monitoring and forecasting hazards, disseminating warnings and ensuring communities can act on them.

Saulo said disaster‑related deaths are “six times lower” in countries with good early‑warning coverage. WMO estimates that investment in such systems can save lives and yield nearly ten times their cost in avoided damage and losses. Yet roughly half of countries still report that they lack comprehensive multi‑hazard warning systems.

January’s extremes offered examples of both progress and persistent gaps. In Chile, mobile phone alerts and coordinated evacuations likely prevented higher death tolls as fires spread. In South Africa, top‑level rainfall warnings were in place days before the worst flooding. In Mozambique and Zimbabwe, however, large numbers of people still lived in flood‑prone areas with limited infrastructure, and emergency services struggled to reach cut‑off communities.

For WMO, the lesson is not that such events are entirely new, but that they are unfolding on a planet that has already warmed significantly, with more people and assets exposed.

“Intense heat and fire, record‑breaking cold and snow, devastating rainfall and flooding” made January a month of extremes in both hemispheres, the agency said. Whether such months remain rare or become routine, it added, will depend on how quickly emissions are reduced — and how fast the world can get reliable warnings, sturdy infrastructure and basic protections in place for those in harm’s way.