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An extreme and record summer: Spain has lived 42 days trapped in heat waves since June

2022-08-30T10:59:30.127Z


The country has suffered three episodes of soaring temperatures that have gone off the charts due to their harshness, geographic spread, and duration. Added to this is a lack of rain, also historical, and a devastating fire season.


This summer is not being normal.

It is not true that it has always been this hot in Spain, because this year is being extreme and plagued by anomalies referring to average temperatures, maximum temperatures, minimum night temperatures... It is also a record summer due to the drought and the number of large fires that have occurred and the hectares that have already burned.

Although it is necessary to wait for the summer to end, on September 23, in order to have the complete picture, some data that scientists have is already eloquent: for example, that of heat waves, which have simply gone out of the registers.

Spain has suffered three such events this year.

They have been anomalous because of their hardness, because of their geographical extension and because of their duration.

Total,

"It is the maximum of the entire series, well ahead of 2015, which with 29 days was the previous maximum," highlights Bea Hervella, spokesperson for Aemet.

Already the first wave that was experienced in Spain left the records, because "it was very early", adds Hervella.

"It began on June 12 and lasted seven days," according to data from this state agency.

“It affected 39 provinces, which makes it the third largest in the series”, which starts in 1975.

The second was also “extraordinary” and lasted 18 days – it started on July 9 and did not end until the 26th.

It affected 43 provinces and is the second longest recorded in Spain.

In addition, according to the latest balance of the Aemet, it has been "the most intense in the series", with an anomaly of 4.6 degrees Celsius.

The third and most recent – ​​began on July 30 and ended on August 15 – and affected 27 provinces, according to the provisional analysis of this state agency, which could change something when all the data from the stations is finished processing. that are studied, 137 of the country.

In the case of the Canary Islands, Aemet points out that there have been two heat waves so far, "the first between July 9 and 11 and the second between July 24 and 26."

A heat wave is an episode of abnormally high temperatures that last for several days and affect a significant part of a geographic area, such as a country.

But there are no specific, precise and unified criteria throughout the world.

Aemet considers that there is a heat wave when there is an episode of at least three consecutive days in which at least 10% of the stations that are taken as reference register daily maximums above the average for the months of July and August of the period between 1971 and 2000.

Based on these criteria, the Aemet has recorded nearly 70 heat waves in the last five decades.

In the entire series, there had never been 42 days with a heat wave in a year in Spain.

As Hervella points out, the previous maximum number of days occurred in 2015. That the precedent dates from only seven years ago is no coincidence, because this type of extreme phenomena has increased in frequency and intensity in the last decade in Spain.

And scientists look directly to the climate crisis to explain it.

"The IPCC [the panel of experts, on the other hand, climate change of the UN] warns us that this type of extreme phenomena increase due to warming", recalls Hervella.

But the climate system is complex and there are many variables, which are currently being analyzed, adds this specialist.

"A study is needed to be able to attribute a particular heat wave directly to climate change," she concludes.

The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group of scientists does just that.

This summer they produced an attribution report on the heat wave that was also experienced in July in the United Kingdom and that led to temperatures exceeding 40 degrees in that country for the first time.

“Human-caused climate change made the event at least 10 times more likely,” that express analysis concluded.

Two people sunbathed in Hyde Park (London), on the 12th. TOLGA AKMEN (EFE)

The extreme heat has not only hit Spain, but has affected much of Europe.

As Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change service, which is part of the EU Space Program, explains, the summer is extremely dry and hot in almost all of Europe.

"It's something quite unusual," he says, referring to the "spatial extent" of this phenomenon.

The hottest month ever recorded

If average temperatures are taken as a reference, the summer of 2022 is also being anomalous in Spain.

July, with an average of 25.6 degrees, is the warmest month ever recorded in Spain since at least 1961, when the Aemet series began.

This month is going along a similar path: the period between August 1 and 21, 2022, with an average temperature of 24.8 degrees, "is the second warmest in the series, behind 2003," says Hervella.

If the focus is raised a little more, and the period between May 1 and August 21 of this year is taken as a reference, the data once again show that we are heading towards a record year: "It is the warmest of the series, with a national average temperature of 22.4 degrees, followed by 2017, with 21.6 degrees”.

lack of rain

In addition to being hot, the summer is extremely dry.

"The period from May 1 to August 21 is the driest at the national level, with an average rainfall of 57.4 mm," says the Aemet.

The second in the series, with 63.2 mm, is 1965. This lack of rain, together with the heat, is taking the water reserves in Spain to the extreme.

The Belesar reservoir (Lugo), on Friday.ÓSCAR CORRAL

This week, the peninsular reservoirs were at 36.9% of their capacity, almost 20 points below the average of the last 10 years.

To find such a low level of water reserves in this same week of the year, you have to go back to the great drought of 1995. Restrictions in small municipalities and irrigation systems —which are the main consumers of stored water in the country— are spreading.

And the generation of energy in hydroelectric plants, which use waterfalls, is also at a minimum: between January 1 and August 15, production in these plants in Spain has been less than 11,400 gigawatt hours (GWh) , the lowest figure since 1992, according to data from Red Eléctrica de España.

Again, what is happening in Spain is not something isolated from the European context.

According to the latest drought monitoring report from the Joint Research Center (JRC), a group of scientists dependent on the Commission, this week, 64% of the European territory was in a "warning or alert situation" due to lack of rain.

The coordinator of this bulletin is the researcher Andrea Toreti

,

which points out that this year's drought could be historic.

In 2019, Toreti and a group of JRC researchers published a study in which, after analyzing paleoclimatic data, they concluded that the drought Europe suffered in 2018 was the most severe in almost 500 years.

"The year 1540 was almost as severe as 2018," Toreti says in an email.

“The current drought seems to be worse than the one in 2018 and therefore the worst in the last 500 years.

The definitive data at the end of the season will confirm this preliminary evaluation”, adds this researcher.

In the Spanish case, the lack of rainfall during this summer is not, however, the main cause of the poor situation of the reserves.

The country has been dragging a time with little dammed water for months.

Already in March the reserves had fallen to the levels of the great drought of the nineties of the last century.

Fires

Linked to extreme temperatures and lack of rain, fires have also increased this year in Spain.

As of August 14, there had been 50 large forest fires (those affecting more than 500 hectares).

As of August 14, almost 230,000 hectares had been burned this year, a figure that is four times above the average of the last decade.

Government records go back to 1968 and show that the worst year in Spain in terms of area affected by fires was 1985, with 484,475 hectares affected.

But that was during the 365 days of that year and 2022 still has four months left.

In addition to the three deaths and almost 90 injuries, this year's fires in Spain have caused significant material damage.

The Council of Ministers has approved declaring as "areas seriously affected by civil protection emergencies" the areas affected by 119 fires that occurred this summer in 15 of the 17 autonomous communities.

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Source: elparis

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