First assessment of the “unusually” warm episode that Spain is suffering at the end of March and that will begin to ease this Thursday in a large part of the country, with the exception of the Mediterranean Sea and the Canary Islands, where it will continue to worsen until Saturday. Wednesday was “an exceptionally warm day” for this time of year, said Rubén del Campo, spokesman for the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet). “In most of Spain, except in the Mediterranean, temperatures reached between 7 and 14 degrees above normal,” says the Aemet spokesman, highlighting the 37.8 degrees reached in Tasarte, in the municipality of La Aldea de San Nicolás (south of Gran Canaria). In other places in the Canary Islands they were around 35° and generally exceeded 30° in low areas of the archipelago, “an environment more typical of midsummer”.
On the Cantabrian coast, the thermometer rose to an unbelievable 30° in San Vicente de la Barquera (Cantabria) and at Bilbao and San Sebastián airports. “These two observatories reached 30°C in March for the first time in their historical series on record, which is a record for the monthly maximum temperature,” said the Aemet spokesman. Bilbao Airport has dates from 1948 and San Sebastián Airport from 1956.
And there were three other records: 29.5° in Ciudad Real (it was 29°), 27.1° in Cáceres (26.8°) and at Lanzarote Airport 33.4° (32.7°). Also, despite not being a record, he did 31.5° in Villarrobledo (Albacete); 30.7° in Fuente Palmera (Córdoba) and 30.6° in Carmona (Seville) and 30.5° in San Vicente de la Barquera (Cantabria).
Night temperatures also rose in the Canary Islands TVE meteorologist Nuria Seró wondered on Twitter if anyone could sleep. The minimum values, according to Del Campo, “were very high”, so that a tropical night was recorded in most of the archipelago, in which the thermometers did not drop below 20°. Even in Agüimes (Gran Canaria) it suffered from a hot night “when it doesn’t fall below 25°”, something “very unusual in March”.
Across Spain, Wednesday was a record-breaking warm day, meaning it was the warmest March 29 compared to the temperature on the same days of every same month since records have been kept, 1950. The country has now amassed five records of warm days when the first quarter of the year has barely passed: February 18th and March 12th, 13th, 16th and 29th.
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“The expected full-year average for record hot days and record cold days is about five records each, assuming no change in weather. In 2023, we have already reached this theoretical heat record quota in just one quarter, and at the moment there are no records of cold days,” concludes Del Campo. And all this in the coldest quarter of the year and when summer is still to come. In 2022, the warmest year in Spain on record, there were up to 35 records for warm days and just two for cold ones.
In March 2023, four days were the warmest of their respective dates since the beginning of the series: the 12th, 13th, 16th and 29th. February 20th was also the warmest, so we now have five records for the warmest days theoretically expected value for the whole year. pic.twitter.com/mrxgvVV7ej
— AEMET (@AEMET_Esp) March 30, 2023
This escalation in thermometers is due to the formation of a corridor between a powerful anticyclone and a storm that was filtering a very warm air mass from the south. But this is not the first warm episode ―which is not a heat wave, a phenomenon that by definition can only occur in summer for the time being― in the meteorological spring: on March 10th there was already a four-day summer with temperatures up to 15° above the normal average that set 10 monthly records, with highs of 31.8° and tropical nights.
Both warm episodes are another example of how summer eats up spring in Spain and the root cause, in the absence of more detailed studies, “cannot be another,” says Del Campo, climate change and the progressive warming of the earth.
Unsuitable temperatures for March
And how long will these unreasonable temperatures last until the end of March? This Thursday began with the thermometers soaring in the Canary Islands, where at six in the morning they reached 29° in San Sebastián de La Gomera and 30° in Pájara. At 8 p.m. in Tasarte, south of Gran Canaria, it reached 37.8° on the second day.
“These are very high temperatures, even for the height of summer,” emphasizes Aemet spokesman Rubén del Campo. In the peninsula, on the other hand, the progressive decline has already begun, more pronounced in the north-west, where it was 4°/5° less compared to Wednesday, although temperatures in the Mediterranean and Balearic Islands have increased by 10° more than on Wednesday. This afternoon it reached 34.3° in Novelda (Alicante), 33.3° in Archena (Murcia) and 33° in Xàtiva (Valencia).
Temperatures will drop in the northern third on Friday. In the rest of the country they will not change or fall a bit, although they could still rise a little closer to the Mediterranean coast and the Balearic Islands, where they could exceed 30° in Malaga, Alicante, Valencia and Murcia, even around 34° lie, “a very, very warm environment for the end of March”.
The downside of these high temperatures is the lack of rain, which deepens the situation of long-term meteorological drought that Spain has been experiencing since last December, as well as the increased risk of fires that, although summer is still far away, in large parts of the Landes, there have been very high or extreme values for days. Dry and superheated westerly winds are moving into the Mediterranean this Thursday, making the risk of fire extreme in the east of the country, as well as on the Cantabrian coast and in the Ebro Valley, even more extreme risk of fire in the same areas of the peninsula. The danger lies “in the combination of high temperatures, low humidity and gusts of wind,” warns the Aemet spokesman.
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