Daniel Swain in Popular Science: What you need to know about the heatwave and drought scorching the western US

For many states, summer is off to a historically hot and dry start. Across the western half of the United States, heat records are being broken by the dozen. On June 10, a new report showed that four western states—California, Oregon, Utah, and Nevada—are entirely under drought conditions, with nearly 90 percent of the entire Western region under drought conditions. That’s up from around 75 percent a week ago.

“There’s a 100 percent chance that it gets worse before it gets better,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the New York Times. “We have the whole long, dry summer to get through.”