High temperatures ravage Europe in the dead of winter and break all kinds of records ever seen, the World Meteorological Organization reported Thursday (WMO)
The UN agency highlighted that temperatures above 20°C occurred in many countries of the old continent, even in Central Europe and that, in several nations, from Spain to Eastern Europe, some national temperature records were broken and many venues during the months of December and January.
Hundreds of weather stations across Europe recorded the highest daily temperature ever reached during those two months. As an example, On December 31, the mercury reached a maximum record of 25.1°C in the Spanish city of Bilbao exceeding 24.4 °C on January 1, 2022.
Other outstanding examples of high temperatures during the last day of 2022 were the 18.9°C reached in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, which beat the 13.8°C of January 1993; or the 19.4°C recorded in the German city of Dresden, which pulverized the all-time high of 17.7°C on December 5, 1961.
An area of high pressure over the Mediterranean basin and an Atlantic system of low pressure caused a strong southwesterly flow that brought warm air from northwest Africa to the mid-latitudes. In the eastern North Atlantic, the sea surface temperature was between 1 and 2°C higher than normal, and near the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula this increase was greater.
The publication of these high records coincided with the confirmation of several European national meteorological and hydrological services -such as AEMET (Spain), Meteo France (France), Deutscher Wetterdienst (Germany) and metoffice (United Kingdom) – that the year 2022 was the warmest in history in their respective countries.
Recent WMO data related to Europe
- The frequency and intensity of extreme heat events, including marine heat waves, have increased in recent decades and are expected to that continue to increase regardless of the greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
- Critical thresholds for ecosystems and humans are projected to be exceeded with global warming of 2°C or above the specified Paris Agreement target.
- The WMO published the Report on the State of the Climate in Europe 2021 two months ago, where it was reported on the significant increase in temperatures in Europe during the period 1991-2021, at an average rate of approximately +0.5°C per decade. , the highest of all the world’s continents and a growth of more than twice the world average.
- Despite La Niña conditions keeping global temperatures down for the second year in a row, 2022 is likely to remain the 5th or 6th warmest year on record globally.
