Ávila, Valdezcaray, Haro, Cádiz and Córdoba are some of the Spanish cities that recorded absolute maximum temperature records last week and especially last Wednesday, January 24, according to the report on thermal anomalies for this month provided today by the State Agency of Meteorology (Aemet).
The document specifies that “it is not easy to highlight any province” in particular since “numerous records” have been broken and “on a very general basis” in various parts of Spain.
This type of anomaly, including exceeding maximum values, occurs with increasing frequency in Spain, especially in the Mediterranean region, with values ??in principle associated with heat waves but – as this study shows – also outside the summer period. .
According to the table provided by Aemet, among other locations with notable increases, Ávila registered a maximum of 20.8 ºC compared to the previous record of 19.6 (in 2007), Valdezcaray reached 17.3 ºC compared to the previous record of 13.9 ( in 2013), Haro reached 20.5 ºC compared to the previous 18.8 (in 2016), Cádiz rose to 24.1 ºC compared to the previous 22.5 (in 2007) and Córdoba airport experienced 23.5 ºC compared to to the previous 22.9 (in 2007).
The report indicates that the frequency of the appearance of records in very long series of records “is increasing very rapidly”, especially in the case of daily maximum temperatures, but warns that winter anticyclones are a “typical” phenomenon of the months December and January and that the current one is an “isolated” event that should not be linked to climate change directly.
Now, he considers that there are two particular factors in this case: the value of the pressure at altitude in “a very powerful dorsal structure with exceptional values” and the warm air mass from the southwest contributed by the anticyclone, which contributed to raising the temperatures.
Aemet estimates that changes are occurring in the general behavior of classic patterns after detecting an “obvious lengthening” of the summer period “in almost the entire territory” since 1940, so that on average the current values ??are one month longer than in last.
This allows us to predict that Spain, along with all other countries in the Mediterranean area, will progressively experience a higher average temperature with a greater frequency of extreme phenomena, including “precipitations more intense than those of the pre-industrial period.”
With regard to winter, the evolution towards an increasingly milder season compared to the rigors of other times “began to manifest itself at the beginning of the 80s” and in a more marked way “almost without discontinuities from 2012 onwards.”
The conclusion of the document is that it will be increasingly difficult to observe winters “as cold as those before the 1980s” in a future in which “summers will be longer and winters shorter and milder”, a trend that ” it does not seem easy to reverse” in the coming decades.
