This year, April in Spain is generally exceptionally hot, on average the temperature there is 10 to 15 degrees higher than usual for this time.
Specialists explain this with the arrival of hot air from Africa, after which there was no wind, and the heat only intensified.
“It’s not normal, the temperature has completely gone out of control this year,” said Caetano Torres, a representative of the Spanish Meteo Service, in an interview with the BBC.
Due to the unprecedented heat, schools in Spain have been forced to change their schedules, metro trains in Madrid have started to run more frequently so that people don’t have to wait too long on the sweltering platforms, and this year public swimming pools will be open a month earlier than usual so that people can cool off there.
Meteorologists attribute the abnormal temperatures recorded in Spain this week to a combination of several factors.
The high pressure area over the Iberian Peninsula and thus the cloudless sky allows the sun’s rays to heat up the soil unhindered, which is already parched and cannot reduce the heat through evaporation.
In general, all of this threatens with strong and premature forest fires in April, and wide areas are in the risk zone. Last year, Spain suffered the most of all European countries from such fires.
Of course, many scientists are quick to attribute this to global warming.
“We already know that 2022 was the second warmest year in recorded European history,” Samantha Burgess of the Copernicus Science Center told the BBC.
“Europe is warming at twice the global rate, but the higher the rate of warming, the greater the likelihood of natural disasters, including extreme heat.”
Apart from the negative impact on people, especially those at risk, which include the elderly and very young children, the heat has a bad effect on agriculture.
Many Spanish farmers complain that the lack of rain could lead to crop failure and the authorities in Madrid have already turned to the European Union for financial help.
Some landowners, given the unfavorable weather conditions, refused to plant at all, so as not to waste funds, and this can have a significant impact on food supplies throughout Europe.
The heat that has gripped Spain is far from an isolated phenomenon. In the first months of the year, temperature records were broken in many parts of the world (Great Britain with its unusually cold April is not counted).
On the first day of 2023, eight countries in Central and Eastern Europe immediately set January high temperature records.
Records are also broken in Asia: 45.4 degrees Celsius was recorded in northwestern Thailand on April 15, and the temperature in Laos reached 42.7 degrees Celsius. 40 degrees Celsius was observed in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh – this is the record for the last 58 years.
Another factor capable of influencing the weather on a global scale in the coming months is considered the El Niño effect, which is an abnormally large increase in the temperature of the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean.
If ocean surface temperatures off the coast of Peru begin to rise, 2024 could go down as the warmest on record, which means more and more hurricanes, wildfires and floods to watch out for.
2023-04-27 19:53:00
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