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Days into the New Year, deadly wildfires, fueled by wind and scorching summer heat, continued to rage across Australia’s southeast.

Thousands of tourists and residents have been forced to evacuate from areas along the southeast coast so far, and tens of thousands more are fleeing to safer ground ahead of the weekend, with forecasters predicting a new round of dangerous fire conditions.

High winds and temperatures reaching close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 38 Celsius, are expected starting Friday.

Australia’s 2019 fire season started early and has been exceptionally brutal, experts say, even for a country used to regular burning.

Wildfires have scorched millions of acres of land across the country since October, destroying more than a thousand homes and killing at least 18 people, including three volunteer firefighters.

The most-affected state, New South Wales, which includes Sydney, Australia’s largest city, is having its worst fire season in 20 years.

This chart was created using data from two NASA satellites, Terra and Aqua, which can detect the infrared radiation emitted by fires.

The last time New South Wales saw a similarly large area burn was in 1974, but those fires were in more remote areas, Ross Bradstock, director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, told The Guardian.

A spokeswoman for the New South Wales Rural Fire Service called the scale of the fires “unprecedented” so early in the season.

Why Is This Year’s Fire Season So Brutal?

A combination of record-breaking heat, drought and high wind conditions have dramatically amplified the recent fire season in Australia.

This week, government records confirmed that 2019 was the country’s hottest and driest year on record:

The last month of 2019 saw particularly low rainfall, and the country recorded its hottest day yet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to assess major research on global warming and related climate impacts, found that the number of days with high-risk fire weather are expected to increase across southern Australia as the world warms.