April is typically hot in South and Southeast Asia, but temperatures this month have been unusually high.

Hundreds of millions of people in South and Southeast Asia were suffering on Monday from a punishing heat wave that has forced schools to close, disrupted agriculture, and raised the risk of heat strokes and other health complications.

The weather across the region in April is generally hot, and comes before Asia’s annual summer monsoon, which dumps rain on parched soil. But this April’s temperatures have so far been unusually high.

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Asia’s heat wave isn’t happening in a meteorological vacuum. Last year was Earth’s warmest by far in a century and a half. And the region is in the middle of an El Niño cycle, a climate phenomenon that tends to create warm, dry conditions in Asia.

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