Too many anomalies overshadow the normal ones. This Tuesday, July 18, 2023, France is facing a hot day, especially in the south of the country, which is currently affected by a heat dome that is affecting all of southern Europe. Météo France has also placed ten departments in the south on orange heatwave alert for Wednesday.
Ouest-France occasionally invites you to remember the seasonal normalities, often forgotten and touched daily by the unprecedented heat of recent years.
Only on the Côte d’Azur are there normal values above 30°C
The “norm values” currently used are calculated over thirty years and updated every ten years and refer to the period 1991-2020, which thus replaces the values from 1981-2010. Météo France updated these climate references in 2022.
According to this new reference 1991-2020, while temperatures around 30°C are observed less and less frequently in areas such as the Ile-de-France or even Brittany, only the Côte d’Azur has normal maximum temperatures above 30°C for a month of July .
Here are the maximum and minimum normal values recorded at the main Météo France stations:
Several records were broken locally on Tuesday, notably in the Pyrénées-Orientales and Corsica. In Verdun, in Ariège, the thermometer climbed to 40.6°C, the highest temperature ever recorded in the region. Or 14.6C higher than the July normal for the city.
The absolute heat record was also broken in Serralongue in the Pyrénées-Orientales on Tuesday with a temperature of 40.1 °C. Here, too, the value is 13°C higher than normal.
Outside the Mediterranean rim, temperatures will be well above normal in many areas this Tuesday when we feel relatively spared from the current heat.
In Paris, for example, according to the Météo France forecast, the maximum temperature for Tuesday is 30 °C, well above normal (25.7 °C). Or in Rennes the mercury will rise to 29 °C this Tuesday, also four degrees higher than normal.
Higher and higher normal values
According to Météo France, these references are severely affected by the effects of climate change. These indicators have increased in recent decades. The average annual temperature in France is 12.97 °C in the period 1991-2020, an increase of 1.15 °C compared to the period 1961-1990.
Even if these normal values already seem a little removed from the current reality given the extraordinary climatic episodes of recent years, it must not be forgotten that this reference period 1991-2020 includes many episodes and record values until now unpublished: 2020, the hottest year that was ever recorded in France before 2022. In 2019, exceptional heat waves in southern France caused unprecedented temperatures of 46°C.