Australia greeted with extreme heatwave on first day of summer

The first day of the southern hemisphere summer on Thursday would normally be welcome in Australia, expect for the projected heatwave in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales states.

Temperatures are expected to soar past 40 degrees Celcius over the next three to five days, nine degrees above the December average, causing authorities to activate a safety plan usually reserved for floods and cyclones due to the high risk of heatstroke.

Australia's weather bureau says heatwaves have taken more lives in the 200 years than any other natural hazard downunder, such as the 374 people that died from a heatwave in Melbourne just prior to the Black Saturday wild fire that killed 173 in 2009.

Though there is debate to reach consensus on what a heatwave event is, Australian authorities have implemented a classification scheme as either low, medium or extreme.

Risk Frontiers' lead catastrophe loss modeller Dr Thomas Loridan, who is supported by Australia's insurance industry, instead has developed a scheme classifying the often misunderstood natural disaster in a way similar to cyclones.

"It's a way to communicate the risk [in] a similar fashion to what is done for tropical cyclones," Loridan told Australia's national broadcaster on Thursday.

"For every 100,000 people exposed to a category five heatwave, you would get at least three fatalities."

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology have rated the heatwave hitting southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales as "severe to extreme".

The omens aren't good for the coming Australian summer after a very wet winter resulted in significant vegetation growth, adding more fuel for any bushfire when with the plants dry and grass dry.

"Extra crews are on standby in areas of high risk and fire-fighters have been spent many months preparing for the summer bushfire season," Queensland state Emergency Services Minister Mark Ryan said in a statement. Endit