California faces extreme blackouts as it fights interlinked heat waves and lightning

The atmospheric pattern stoking California's record-breaking heatwave this week has also played a role in causing extreme lightning storms that have sparked scores of wildfires, weather and fire officials said on Tuesday. The surge in lightning strikes - the most widespread burst of such storms in California since 2008 - has come with very little rain, ratcheting up an already volatile wildfire season.

As of Tuesday afternoon, nearly 6,000 lightning strikes were recorded during a single 24-hour stretch, igniting more than 200 wildfires from the San Francisco Bay area north to California's Gold Country, said Lynette Round, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire).

Hundreds of miles to the south, a lightning-caused blaze that started on Saturday has scorched another 44,000-plus acres of dry grass and desert scrub on the floor of the Mojave National Preserve, which encompasses the world's largest Joshua tree forest and habitat of the threatened desert tortoise.

Abnormally high temperatures that began roasting California on Friday, straining the state's power grid and leading to rolling blackouts, are due to an enormous dome of high pressure hovering over America's desert Southwest, weather officials said.

Daytime highs have shattered records across the state, with the hottest air temperature recorded anywhere on Earth during the last century reached in Death Valley National Park on Sunday afternoon, where the mercury soared to 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 Celsius).