He balance of the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) of this April certifies what it had already been announcing throughout the month, in which week after week abnormally high temperatures have been recorded, until the final firecracker in the thermometers, and tremendously little rain. After analyzing the data, Aemet climatologists have concluded that it was the “most extremely warm and driest” April since there are unified and reliable records, 1961.
The average temperature, that is, between the maximum and the minimum, has been located at 14.9° in mainland Spain, an astonishing figure that is three degrees above the average for the month. So what the roof of the most hellish April so far, that of 2011, was very high: this month it has exceeded that anomaly by 0.1°. As data, in May the average temperature is 15.6°. Although far from the peninsular level, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands have also suffered a “very warm” month, with 0.8° and 1.9° above the average. For its part, the average rainfall over mainland Spain was 14.2 liters per square meter, barely 22% of the expected rainfall.
In the map of the scorching heat, the interior of Andalusia, the east of Extremadura and the southwest of Castilla-La Mancha lose out, where the average temperature anomaly has been around 4° more, almost 5° in some areas of these three communities. Even in less suspicious areas, such as the Navacerrada peak (Madrid), the thermometers have been 4.5° above what they should be. Areas of the eastern Cantabrian Sea and the coasts of Catalonia and the Valencian Community have barely escaped the Iberian oven, where they have spent the month at only 1° more.
At 30 of the 93 stations on Aemet’s main network, the average temperature was “the highest in April on record.” In 45, the mean of the maxima was the highest in the monthly series. And the worst have been the highs, which stood at an average of 22.6° and climbed to 4.7° above the normal value, with Jaén at 6.8° above, Córdoba at 6.5°, Cuenca and Morón de la Frontera (Seville) at 6.4°, and even Soria at 4.8°. However, the minimums did not shoot up that much and there were even frosts in inland areas, so they ended up only 1.3° above. Thus, in four seasons the average of the minimums was exceeded and there were tropical nights, in which the thermometers did not drop below 20° in Jaén, Cáceres, Cádiz and Palma.
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In the main Aemet observatories, 58 maximum and minimum records have been broken, in some cases, such as the one at the Córdoba airport, three consecutive days. Of these marks, Aemet highlights the last of the three records for Córdoba, 38.8°, which became the highest temperature ever measured on the Peninsula and the Balearic Islands in April, followed by 37.4° for Morón, and the 36.9° from the aerodromes of Granada and Seville, all of them on the 27th, at the peak of the episode of extreme heat.
The meteorologist of The time is Roberto Granda makes a more complete balance of records, since it includes the stations of the secondary network and eliminates the ephemeris exceeded several times. Only during the five days that the extreme episode lasted, 193 records were broken, while the 200 is exceeded taking into account the entire month. Granda points out to this newspaper that the communities in which the most records have fallen are Andalusia, Extremadura, Madrid, Castilla-la Mancha, Castilla y León, while La Rioja and the Basque Country are the only ones in which the heat marks.
“Córdoba has spent 17 days above 30° and four above 35°, which had never been seen in April, while cities like Valladolid, Cuenca and Soria have experienced their first 30° this month,” notes this expert, for whom “there is no way to describe what happened, with records that are broken by four and five degrees, it is a real savage.” Last Friday, experts from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) ruled that these values would have been “extremely unlikely” without anthropogenic climate change, which makes this episode at least 100 times more likely than in a climate not altered by man.
All in all, despite the fact that the air mass of African origin arriving on the Peninsula was the warmest on these dates in at least 43 years, in the end it was not the worst episode of heat recorded in April since there is data, already according to Cayetano Torres, head of Communication at Aemet, “in average temperature it equaled that of 2011, although in the average of the maximum it is a record”.
After this April, which came after the fifth consecutive warm winter and the second warmest March century, the agency’s forecasts are not good. For the quarter May-June-Julythere is a greater probability that it will be warmer than normal in all of Spain, with greater forcefulness in the east of the peninsula, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands.
As for the rains, absolute desolation. “100% of the Peninsula had more hours of sunshine than normal, with an average of 320 hours, which is why it turned out to be the sunniest month in the period 1983-2023, surpassing the year 2017, in which the average was 294″, points out climatologist and researcher Dominic Royé. The result is that the month has had an “extremely dry” character in the Aemet classification, in fact “the driest since the beginning of the series in 1961”, with an average rainfall over mainland Spain of 14.2 liters, which supposes only 22% of the normal value of the month.
In the Balearic Islands, 16.9 liters have been collected and in the Canary Islands, 3.5, so it has been “very dry” there, one step below that in the rest of the country. It has ended between dry and normal in Galicia, northern Catalonia, parts of Castilla y León, northern Navarra, northeastern Basque Country, coastal areas of Murcia and the eastern Canary Islands. It has not been rainy in any area of the country and in 14 main stations on the Peninsula it has been the driest April since there are data.
“The few liters that have fallen on the Albacete observatory and the 0.4 in Granada and Valencia stand out among all the ephemeris,” says one of the Aemet spokesmen, Ricardo Torrijo. From the beginning of the hydrological year, on October 1, until this May 2, an average of 346 liters have been collected26% less than the normal value, which deepens the situation of long-term drought that Spain entered in December and from which it will not emerge at least until autumn.
Two more days of heat and thermal drop on Wednesday
The good news is that the intense heat that has continued during the first days of May, with values more typical of June than of this time of the year, will give way from Wednesday to several milder days, to the point that it will become at March temperatures in areas of the north of the peninsula. Thus, the thermometers will continue this Monday and Tuesday between 5° and 10° above normal in much of the interior of the peninsula, with 30° in much of the interior and up to 35° in the southern half, but on Wednesday It will produce a general thermal drop of up to 10°, which will extend in large areas until Friday, when the entire country, except the Canary Islands and the peninsular southwest, will have lower than normal temperatures.
Normal values for mid-March are expected on Friday in Vitoria (13°), Pamplona (15°) and Logroño (16°), but 30° persist in Córdoba and 32° in Seville. As for the rains, they will be weak, in some cases accompanied by storms, and will be restricted to Galicia, the Cantabrian communities and the Pyrenees, and will appear on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in the northeast of Catalonia. For the weekend, a new rise in temperatures is expected, although slight.
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