The warning covers very hot air masses arriving from 13 July: daytime temperatures of +38 to +41 across most of the country on Monday, up to +42 to +44 in the north, south and desert zone, rising through midweek toward +44 to +46 in places, with dust storms possible. Tashkent is forecast at +40 to +43 by 15 to 17 July.
Karakalpakstan moved first. Nukus and the Khojeyli district suspended state and private kindergartens from 13 to 18 July; the Amudarya district from 13 to 15 July; Beruniy, Takhiatash, Shumanay, Muynak, Kanlykul and Turtkul from 13 to 17 July, each on the conclusions of the sanitary-epidemiological committee’s territorial units. Parents were told to keep children out of the sun in peak hours.
The infrastructure reading is why this desk logs it. Peak cooling demand lands on a power system Central Asia Wire has tracked all month, through a gas import bill up 84% and record petrol prices, and it lands hardest in the Aral zone, the most water-stressed corner of a country whose census just found irrigated land 23% above what planners had assumed and children under 5 its largest cohort, the group these closures touch. Every degree of this week is a load test for HS-03, and the results will show up in the grid data before they show up in the news.