Wildfires in the state of New Mexico are continuing to burn out of control. They've now destroyed more than a thousand homes, and the entire population of one town was ordered to evacuate. It's not the only problematic weather in America. In the northeast of the United States, more than 70 million people remain under heat alerts. Will Grant reports from California.

A inspiring but deadly. A towering wall of flames and heat bearing down on the town of Ruydozo in New Mexico has overwhelmed local fire crews and forced residents to flee. Most just thankful to leave with their lives, but shaken. Frank and Connie Lawyer, both 83, are sheltering in an evacuation center. Lucky to have made it out at all.

We could see the smoke changed, and we were engulfed in smoke. That scared me to death. I don't know whether we're going to have a home. There are several people in that area, just above us, that lost their home.

In California, these are now all too familiar scenes. Hillsides ablaze, thousands of hectares lost as tinder dry brush catches a light, and firefighters struggling to bring around a dozen separate places under control.

It is devastating, especially when you get these wind-driven fires and you have all this unburned fuel combined with low relative humidity. It can create massive damage.

As Californians endure another season of rampant wildfires, warnings over extreme weather are in place across the country, from heat waves in the northeast to a tropical storm in Texas, a nation experiencing the real-time effects of climate change.

And this is just the start. Experts say this has been an unusually early and aggressive fire season, with several months of hot, dry weather ahead. The contrast with the in Texas couldn't be starker. The first tropical storm of the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico has caused flooding in Galveston as well as in Mexico itself, as North America braces itself for more extreme weather to come. Will Grant, BBC News, Southern California.

Well, you heard there Will referencing Galveston in Texas. Tropical storm Alberto is forming in the Gulf of Mexico. Texas is being hit. We can bring you now live pictures coming to us from the coastline in Galveston. Still, obviously, night time hours there. It's quite dark, but you can see palm trees blowing, very bending, I should say, in the wind. Very strong waves there hitting the shoreline as well in Galveston. Let's bring in Matthew Capucci, who's a meteorologist for the My Radar weather app based in Washington. Matthew, thanks for joining us. Obviously, you're in a big country, lots of different weather problems across the continent. Tell us, firstly, about Tropical storm Alberto and what the concerns are for how much damage it could do.

Yeah. So We're performing in a rather unusual way for this time of year. We had something called the Central American Gire. Essentially, this big swirl in the atmosphere, broad and diffuse over the Gulf of Mexico, the Bay of Campichi, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Western Caribbean. But we had a lobe of tighter vorticity or spin really consolidate today and work ashore in Mexico. But at the same time, that broader circulation is steering an absolute fire hose of moisture into Texas, with 5 to 10 centimeters worth of rainfall in many areas thus far. A another 10 centimeters set to come. And already we've seen winds gusting up to about 60 kilometers per hour. But again, flooding is that main concern, both coastal and inland.

Okay, let's shift gears and go to New Mexico, Mexico itself and California, the wildfires there. What's in the forecast that could make it easier or perhaps harder to bring these fires under control?

That's a really good question. And something strange happened today. Moisture and Easterly winds at the middle levels from that tropical storm we just talked about, Alberto, crossed into Eastern New Mexico, where that big fire was burning near Ruyidos or prompting the evacuations earlier this week. That helped spawn a rotating thunderstorm that dropped golf ball-sized tail onto the wildfire along with prolific rainfall. Now, on one hand, the rainfall is good because it cuts back on the fire. On the other hand, that leads to debris flows and mud flows, prompting evacuations there and flash flood emergencies to be issued. Then hot, dry weather across the remainder of the West is leading to more rampant wildfire conditions, making it easier for those fires to burn and fuels to cure or dry.

Okay, let's head to the northeast now, one of the most densely populated parts of the country. More than 70 million Americans there remaining under heat alerts. For how long?

Yeah, this is a really long-duration heatwave. I can tell you, I stepped outside earlier on today, and only being out for 30 seconds a minute is more than enough for me. Temperature in the upper 30s, around 40 Celsius in some places. It feels like temperature pushing to 40 Celsius in a number of major northeast cities. The reason? A big heat dome, a sprawling ridge of high pressure. It's like a forest field. It pushes away any storms, the jet stream, any clouds, leaving the sun to bake the ground with hot, dry, sinking air. And these temperatures are likely to stick around until at least Friday or Saturday. And honestly, I think there's a good chance it could linger into early next week as well as that heat dome merges and reforms a little bit.

Matthew, the age-old question with extreme weather like this, what links can we draw between these incidents and climate change?

Right off the bat, we know that heat domes always occur in the summertime, but the scale is tilting to make them disproportionately more intense, longer duration, and more severe. So again, that may be something we're seeing nowadays. In addition, I want to talk about something called the Clausius-Claperon relationship. Basically, it's a relationship that says that for every degree of Celsius the air temperature warms, the air can hold 4% more water. Where there is moisture available, you get heavier rainfall rates, more flooding. Where it's not available, you get more moisture sucked out of the ground, drier conditions. So in California, that could mean more drought and more wildfire activity out there. Whereas in Texas right now, where the atmosphere is satched with, it could support more flooding. So nothing is really caused by climate change, but things are becoming more worse, more extreme due to human influence on the atmosphere.

Okay, Matthew Capucci from the My Radar weather app. Thank you for joining us. Let's take you back to Galveston, Texas, where you can see these live pictures coming into us from the coastline tropical storm, Alberto, beginning to make landfall. You the impact of them in the strength of the waves and just how much those palm trees are blowing in those very strong winds. We'll bring you more from there as the storm develops throughout the day.