Norway's central Atlantic coast battened down on Wednesday as authorities warned that the country could see its most powerful storm in three decades and urged people to stay indoors.

Hurricane-force winds were expected to hit the region, as air traffic companies and ferry lines predicted disruptions. Police warned that gusts of 126 to 180 kilometers per hour (78 to 112 miles per hour) were expected.

Residents were evacuated from small coastal towns near Cape Town in South Africa as wildfires swept down from surrounding mountains and burned out of control for a second day on Tuesday.

Authorities ordered a full evacuation of Pringle Bay, a coastal village popular with holidaymakers about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Cape Town. People evacuated parts of the nearby town of Betty's Bay on Monday.

Barcelona and its surrounding in northeastern Spain's Catalonia region are preparing for tighter water restrictions amid a historic drought that has shrunk reservoirs to record lows.

Catalan authorities are expected to declare a drought emergency Thursday for an area that is home to 6 million people after water reserves fell below 16% of their capacity, the benchmark set for the application of a new round of water-saving measures.

Spain's weather agency says recent abnormally high temperatures for this time of year are set to continue in many parts of Spain on Friday and over the weekend. The hot spell has led to an almost summer-like feeling in many coastal areas as people take to the beaches to sunbathe, and some have a winter swim.

The country's AEMET weather agency said the high temperatures affecting southern Europe are due to an anticyclone carrying a hot air mass from further south. It said that the lack of cloud cover also led to increased temperatures.

The groundwater that supplies farms, homes, industries and cities is being depleted across the world, and in many places faster than in the past 40 years, according to a new study that calls for urgency in addressing the depletion.

The declines were most notable in dry regions with extensive cropland, said researchers whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. On the plus side: they found several examples of aquifers that were helped to recover by changes in policy or water management, they said.

Colombia's government has declared a disaster and asked for international help to combat raging wildfires that are expected to worsen in coming days due to warm, dry conditions associated with the El Niño weather phenomenon.

Officials raised the number of fires from 25 to 31, and said nine of them were under control. They did not order mandatory evacuations despite some fires burning in the mountains that surround some municipalities.

Strong winds hit Australia's northeast coast Friday, leaving thousands without power, but the area was spared heavy damage as Tropical Cyclone Kirrily weakened into a tropical storm.

Wind gusts of up to 170 kilometers an hour (105.6 miles per hour) battered coastal cities and towns, while fallen trees caused property damage. Weather officials warned of continuing heavy rain and strong winds.

Human-induced global warming, and not El Niño, was the primary driver of last year's severe drought in the Amazon that sent rivers to record lows, required deliveries of food and drinking water to hundreds of river communities and killed dozens of endangered dolphins, researchers said Wednesday.

Both climate change and El Niño contributed about equally to a reduction in rainfall. But higher global temperatures were the biggest reason for the drought, according to World Weather Attribution, an initiative that brings together climate scientists to rapidly analyze extreme events and their possible connections to climate change.

A rhinoceros was impregnated through embryo transfer in the first successful use of a method that conservationists said might later make it possible to save the nearly extinct northern white rhino subspecies.

In testing with another subspecies, the researchers created a southern white rhino embryo in a lab from an egg and sperm that had been previously collected from other rhinos and transferred it into a southern white rhino surrogate mother at the Ol-Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

Thirty-one people were confirmed dead while several remained missing Tuesday after a landslide in a remote, mountainous part of China's southwestern province of Yunnan, Chinese state media reported.

The disaster struck just before 6 a.m. on Monday in the village of Liangshui in the northeastern part of Yunnan.