nearly 30°C recorded in the middle of winter – Libération

Global warming

Nearly 400 weather stations recorded temperatures equal to or above 20°C in the south and east of Spain on Thursday January 25, with a peak of 29.5°C in Valencia. A worrying “anomaly”.

Summer in the middle of January. Temperatures around 30°C were recorded on Thursday January 25 in Spain, under the yoke of a heat wave worthy of the start of summer. According to the Spanish meteorological agency Aemet, worried about this “anomaly”, the thermometer rose to 29.5°C on Thursday afternoon in the Valencia region, in the east of the country, to 28.5°C. in Murcia, in the South-East, and at 27.8°C near Malaga, in the south of Andalusia. This is a level “specific to the middle or end of June”, that is to say “summer”, pointed out X Rubén del Campo, the spokesperson for Aemet. He recalls that the average maximum temperature in January in Spain is 10.6°C.

Temperatures “reached or exceeded 20°C” in “nearly 400 meteorological stations” in the country, or almost one in two, Rubén del Campo stressed. Thus, several local temperature records for the month of January were broken across the country. Worse, the thermometer did not drop below 10°C during the night from Wednesday to Thursday in the small ski resort of Puerto de Navacerrada, located in the Madrid region, at… 1,900 meters above sea level.

29.9°C in December

According to David Corell, researcher at the University of Valencia, this heat in the middle of winter is caused by the presence of a powerful anticyclone above the Mediterranean, which also causes the mercury to soar in the south-east of France. “There are no studies yet that have evaluated the long-term trend of this type of event, but it is clear that we are experiencing this type of abnormal situation more and more frequently,” he explained. .

Accustomed to high temperatures, Spain is faced with increasingly numerous and frequent heat episodes, sometimes outside the summer months, which worry scientists. The country has already recorded unusually high temperatures in December, with a peak of 29.9°C in Malaga, a national record for the month of December.

The average temperature on January 24, 2024 in the port of Navacerrada (1900 meters) was typical of mid or late June, that is, summer.

This morning it has not dropped below 10 ºC and at 10:00 it is 14 ºC. With this data alone, we are already talking about a new day in June. https://t.co/4JZxKhl6F4

— Rubén del Campo (@Rub_dc) January 25, 2024

These heat waves occur in a context of severe drought, particularly in Andalusia and Catalonia, where the authorities have implemented restrictive measures for water consumption, after three years of low rainfall. In Catalonia, the level of reservoirs, which store rainwater for use during drier months, fell to 17% of their capacity in mid-January. If it falls below 16%, which seems imminent, the authorities will have no choice but to declare a state of emergency, with additional restrictions.