The red alert for extreme heat has ended.
After
13 days of high temperatures
, the National Meteorological Service (SMN) announced the green level for the city of Buenos Aires and its surroundings.
The cold front from Patagonia that was expected this weekend has been delayed and will really be "felt" on Wednesday.
After the hottest summer on record at the country level and the intense and extensive heat waves that made March look like January, it's time to think about the next season.
Autumn begins on Tuesday the 21st: will this eternal summer continue?
Everything indicates yes.
That the autumn weather will be
"abnormally" warm
.
Especially in April.
Because?
Did the heat wave upset the forecasts for the next season?
And there are more questions: how much hotter will it be in the months in which we are supposed to wear light jackets or long sleeves?
Also, is the rain coming back?
autumn heat
"The chances of having a warm autumn are
high in much of the country
, except towards the south of Patagonia, where autumn would be normal,"
meteorologist José Luis Stella, from the National Meteorological Service (SMN), explains to
Clarín .
The key is that although the
La Niña
phenomenon has ended - which favored severe drought in several provinces, allowed the skies to be clear and maximum temperatures to be reached easily -
the unwanted "atmospheric blockade
" continues.
This event caused a mass of warm and humid air to remain and also prevented the occurrence of rains in the center and north of the country.
That is why historical records of minimums and maximums
were reached
for March, and the fall will follow that line of warmth.
"The blockade is further north, so luckily in the next few days colder air will enter Buenos Aires, which will give some gradual relief, not the normal fall, because the blockade continues
.
"
How much warmer?
Could
extreme temperatures
be reached equivalent to what was experienced this month?
"Of course, what we are going through in March is exceptional, never seen before, at least in CABA, GBA, the rest of Buenos Aires, the south of the coast, Cuyo and the NOA. With really high temperatures for the time. All this after four months of extreme heat. So, within the meteorological probabilities,
we can say that the autumn will be warmer
. We cannot know in a quarterly report how much warmer, but that is determined in the weekly reports", he details Stella.
When determining how anomalous or abnormal a situation is, one must
understand the normal parameters
.
The "unusual" heat in autumn is that which the SMN registers outside the
average temperature for that season: 18.3º
.
It is that average that is likely to be exceeded in mercury.
The maximum average for the autumn season is 23.2º.
"Perhaps the extreme that the average maximum temperature will be up to 10 degrees higher than normal will not happen, as happened in March in the north of Buenos Aires and the extreme south of Santa Fe and Entre Ríos, while the average maximum it was up to 10 degrees higher than normal (in the north of Buenos Aires and the extreme south of Santa Fe and Entre Ríos)," Stella clarifies.
It is not known today exactly
how many extra degrees of temperature
there will be in the fall because the SMN quarterly report does not forecast extremes, but rather the probability that a season will be "warmer", "colder", or "normal".
Once again, climate change
Beyond the autumn that is getting warmer in Argentina, the planet continues to heat up.
"Is the 1.5º increase in the global average temperature already a thing of the present? The predictions (recently published by the National Supercomputing Center of Spain) indicate that
on average for 2023-2027 it will be between 1.44º and 1.55°
", explains Leandro Díaz, PhD in Atmospheric Sciences and Conicet researcher.
When we talk about what is going to happen in the next days, in the next months or seasons, says Díaz, "we have a problem that strongly depends on the initial conditions", that is, how is the atmosphere/ocean/soil in this moment.
Instead, climate change projections "show long-term evolution (decades-centuries), where it is not so important how the atmosphere/ocean is today, but rather how the forcing forces (greenhouse gases, solar radiation, volcanoes) evolve" .
It is not yet known how reliable these predictions are to know how the climate of a region will evolve.
It is a field of possibilities and uncertainties
.
"Improving knowledge and advancing towards regional climate information that can be used for different sectors for
planning and adaptation
is an important task that must be carried out in our country and region in the coming years," concludes the expert.
The record of the record
On Saturday, March 11, the city of Buenos Aires had a maximum temperature of 38.9°, something that
has never happened this month in 117 years of data
.
Just days before, on Thursday the 2nd, the city had already surpassed the previous absolute record of 37.9° on March 7, 1952 with 38°.
On Sunday the 12th, he broke the
absolute record for the highest minimum temperature
, with 28°, leaving behind the 27.7° of March 21, 1980.
The City also recorded, for the first time in its history,
15 consecutive days with maximum temperatures
above the threshold (maximum) for a heat wave (32.3°).
The previous record was 11 days in 2017.
ACE
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