Spain This year was the warmest January month since this data began being recorded in 1961, the National Weather Service announced on Wednesday, reporting a new anomalous situation in this country on the front lines of climate change.
“Now it is official. Last January was the warmest in the history of Spain,” wrote Rubén del Campo, spokesman for the Spanish state meteorological agency (Aemet), on the social network X. The average temperature was 2.4 degrees Celsius higher than usual, the agency said.
At the end of January, temperatures hovered around 30°C in some parts of Spain, a heatwave worthy of the start of summer (boreal) and considered an “anomaly” by Aemet.
The thermometer rose in this last week of January to 29.5°C in the Valencia region (east), 28.5°C in Murcia (southeast) and 27.8°C near Málaga, in the south of Andalusia.
It hardly snows in the ski areas anymore and you can always see people on the beaches.
In total, more than 400 weather stations in the country, i.e. every second, recorded temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius and more.
A “complicated” situation
Maximum daily temperatures in January averaged 2.5°C above normal, while minimum temperatures averaged 2.3°C above average, Aemet said in its statement.
As for the rain, January was “normal and humid in almost the entire peninsula”, but where water is most needed it was “dry”, explained the Aemet, citing Catalonia or Andalusia.
“We are facing a very complicated situation” and a “high risk,” Agriculture Minister Luis Planas admitted to the press when he learned of these January data.
On February 1, the Catalan regional government declared a drought emergency in Barcelona and its metropolitan area after three years of scant rainfall, which led to a 16% drop in reservoir levels.
This emergency declaration imposes new restrictions on around six million people, particularly on uses related to agriculture, livestock and industry.
If there is still no rain, the government of this region of eight million inhabitants and one of Spain’s economic engines is not ruling out bringing ships loaded with water to Barcelona in the coming months.
One record at a time
In the case of Andalusia, the authorities warned that there would be restrictions in cities such as Seville and Malaga in the summer if it did not rain continuously.
“We need 30 days of rain” in a row, said Andalusian President Juan Manuel Moreno. “Rain is rain, not glitter. We need at least 30 continuous days of this,” he stressed.
According to Aemet, the frequency of heat waves in this country, one of the countries most affected by global warming, has tripled in the last decade. The length of meteorological summer has increased by ten days per decade since the 1980s.
The country has already recorded unusually high temperatures in December, with a high of 29.9°C in Malaga, a national record for the month.
As a result, 2022 was the hottest year on record since at least 1916 (the weather agency retrospectively determined average annual temperatures between 1916 and 1961 based on individual measurements and statistical models).
It was in 2022 when the average annual temperature exceeded 15°C for the first time. After 2022, the two hottest years were 2017 and 2020.
On April 27, 2023, the Spanish peninsula recorded an absolute temperature record for the month of April with 38.8 ° C in Córdoba (south).
A few months later, Aemet announced that spring 2023, from March 1 to May 31, was the warmest since climate statistics began in the country, with an average of 14.2 degrees.
SPRING: AFP