MADRID, June 7 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The summer of 2023 will be very hot throughout Spain, particularly in the Canary and Balearic archipelagos, and it will probably be rainier and stormier than usual in most of the country, especially in the Mediterranean, according to the Agency’s seasonal forecast. State Meteorology (AEMET).
During AEMET’s quarterly press conference, its spokesman, Rubén del Campo, predicted that there is a “high probability” of having a “not only hot, but very hot” summer throughout the country and this probability is even higher. In both archipelagos and regarding rainfall, he points out that this greater sign of rain means that “perhaps the storms are more abundant” than in other years.
Thus, he specifies that there is no clear trend regarding the behavior of rainfall for the months of June, July and August in Galicia, Cantabria and the Canary Islands, while he observes a sign of between 40 and 50 percent that summer will be rainier than normal, especially on the Mediterranean slope and on the Atlantic slope of Andalusia.
However, the probability that they will stay below normal in the quarter is 20 to 25 percent.
“This is significant, taking into account that in the summer there is not usually very high rainfall,” said the spokesman who, in any case, does not believe that these rains are so abundant as to alleviate the current situation of meteorological and hydrological drought.
Specifically, the prediction models give a June-August quarter with between 50 and 60 percent more probabilities that it will be warmer than normal in the Peninsula and up to 70 percent in the archipelagos, compared to a percentage 10 to 20 percent chance that it will be colder than normal.
Thus, the summer of 2023 will come after the warmest spring since there are records in Spain, since the months of March to May were extremely hot, which gave rise to an average temperature in Spain of 14.2 degrees Celsius, which which is almost 2ºC more (1.8ºC) than the average for the reference period (1991-2020) and is even 0.3ºC higher than the spring of 1997, which until now was the warmest in Spain since 1961.
“We are almost getting used to talking about ‘the warmest in the historical series’ because in the last four seasons, three have been the warmest: summer 2022, autumn 2022 and spring 2023”, he highlighted. and this of 2023 could be among the “five, six or seven warmest in the last 30 years” in Spain.
The spokesman recalls the spring of 1997, which “was tremendous and unusual” and insists that 2023 has surpassed it and it is becoming customary that “things that seemed unusual are surpassed too often.”
In this way, it has indicated that the warmest spring in the series has had an anomaly of 1.8ºC on the Peninsula; 0.7ºC in the Balearic Islands and 1.9ºC in the Canary Islands, where it has also been “extraordinarily warm”. There was only one cold period at the beginning of March, when there were some intense frosts.
In the Canary Islands, in fact, there was an episode of high temperatures that reached 38.2ºC in March in the village of San Nicolás (Gran Canaria), the highest temperature ever recorded in Spain in the month of March. All in all March 2023 was the third warmest March in the series.
Regarding the month of April, Del Campo indicates that it was also the warmest April in the series, with an anomaly of 3ºC and an episode of high temperatures that almost reached 39ºC in the Guadalquivir valley; 38.8ºC in Córdoba, which is the highest value in Spain during the fourth month of the year since there are records. Between the 25th and 29th, all days were the warmest for those dates since at least 1950.
However, he adds that May was “a little different” since it began with high temperatures that dropped from the 12th, when a situation of greater cloudiness began, with cold air in the upper layers of the atmosphere, storms that caused the thermometers will remain “very contained”.
Thus, May was a normal month as a whole, but with “marked differences” between the first ten days, which were a warm period, and the rest of the month, with temperatures below normal in the whole of Spain.
DRY SPRING
Regarding rainfall, the AEMET spokesman confirms that it was “very dry”, specifically the second driest in the entire historical series, behind 1995, with rainfall in the country as a whole of 95 liters per square meter, which is little more than half (53%) of the reference period 1991-2020, little more than the 85 liters per square meter collected in the spring months of 1995. “They are the only cases, since at least 1961, in which They accumulate at least 100 liters per square meter in spring,” he stressed.
For months, he points out that March was a “very dry” month in which it barely rained 36 percent of normal, which makes it the sixth driest in the historical series. This was followed by April, which turned out to be “extremely dry”, with rainfall barely exceeding a fifth of normal, making it the driest April on record.
The third month of spring, May, ended with a “normal” character as a result of the continuous showers that were registered almost universally in the Peninsula and the Balearic Islands during the second half of the month.
Del Campo regrets that despite these May rains, given the “very dry” nature of the spring of 2023, the meteorological dry season continues in which the country as a whole has been from the winter of 2021 to 2022 and the drought of long duration -which takes into account the previous 36 months- which began at the end of 2022.
“This is what the IPPC indicates in its reports of compound effects: high temperatures and drought at the same time,” says the spokesman, noting that the current drought could be the longest-lasting and most intense drought on record. historical in Spain.
After the second half of May, which has been rainy, the prediction that provides for a rainier summer than normal is fulfilled, especially due to storms, it could begin to alleviate the situation, but in any case, “as much as it may be a summer stormier than normal”, forecasts that the water reserve and the dammed water reserve will continue to drop, due to the greater heat, greater evaporation and increased demand for water during the summer.
Therefore, he calculates that in order to alleviate the drought situation in autumn, it would have to rain 20 percent more than normal, something that “rarely happens.”
