Six days at more than 34 degrees in April: the islands say goodbye to eternal spring
[ad_1]
Yesterday the Village of San Nicolás recorded the highest temperature in Spain, 34.3 degrees Celsius, Agulo, in Tenerife 33º. In San Bartolomé it was 32.4º and in San Andrés, Agaete or Tasarte it exceeded 30º. The islands have had thermometers above 34º for six consecutive days in April, a month in which the average temperature of the islands is 18.4º. Is the archipelago saying goodbye to ‘eternal spring’?
The heat wave, which began last Friday, but was already being felt since Tuesday in a good part of the island territory, together with an unusual episode of haze, keep the Canary Islands on pre-alert. “We have been watching the climate change for several decades” on the islands, says David Suárez, delegate of the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) in the Canary Islands.
THE THERMOMETER
-
38.5ºC
It is the highest temperature recorded in this new heat episode in the Canary Islands. According to Aemet, on Thursday, April 11, the mercury reached 38.5º C. The next day it dropped to 36.3.
Suárez remembers that in The assessment that Aemet made of the winter already noted that it had been “extremely warm”. In January the mercury in the islands remained “above the average”, which is the reference series from 1991 to 2020, “during every day of the month”, with two heat waves, one between the 8th and the 16th. and another from the 21st to the end of the month with an anomaly of more than 3.1º C.
February was similar: “extremely warm” with temperatures “well above” the average and three episodes of intense heat. And spring seems to be just as anomalous. «March was the first month of spring and it passed normally, but in April we had this episode of high temperatures, of which we have a couple of days left, and the seasonal prediction is a high probability that it will also be warmer than usual. normal,” explains Suárez.
ANDThese data “reflect the consequences of climate change on the planet and in the Canary Islands”, adds the delegate in the Aemet islands. And summer doesn’t look any better. «We also come from a period of low rainfall. In March it rained around half of what was expected, which affects the vegetation and forest areas. And added to them are the episodes of haze, which produce drying out of the vegetation and water stress. Therefore, following the application of the Specific Emergency Plan of the Canary Islands for Risks of Adverse Meteorological Phenomena (Pefma) The alert was activated and now the pre-alertsince it is already estimated “that there is no meteorological risk for the population in general, although there is for some specific activity or location of high vulnerability,” says the Canarian Government in a statement.
Suárez recalls that precisely the high temperatures, the lack of rain and the entry of suspended dust are causing the desertification of the Canary Islands at a rate of 6 square km per year while climate type B, desert, is replacing climate C, temperate.
In addition to the heat in April, an episode of haze like the one that has occurred these days is also unusual. «We are seeing an intense episode, especially between Friday and Sunday, with the characteristics of those produced in winter. This type of intrusion occurs with a marked peak between December and March, and is less common in April,” says Suárez. However, he adds, “in the analysis we did of the winter we pointed out that 85% of the days there was a presence of haze in the archipelago with six days being intense, with visibility below 10 kilometers.”
The Aemet delegate also remembers that in the publication “that Emilio Cuevas released and in which I participated in the conclusions, it talks about the intensity and increased frequency of dust intrusions since winter 2020».
“Adapt and mitigate” are the keys, says David Suárez, in which we can influence climate change.
«A robust anticyclonic ridge doped by global warming»
«What is happening in the Canary Islands? The culprit is a large, robust extreme anticyclonic ridge doped by anthropogenic warming. A small incursion of summer in the middle of April. This is how the physicist and researcher at the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) Juan José González Alemán defined, in his X profile, formerly Twitter, the cause of the high temperatures on the islands these days.
The Teldens meteorologist and popularizer pointed out that it seemed that the “atmospheric circulation had gotten stuck.”
«There is great stability. The anticyclone has been installed in North Africa, this causes the flow towards the Canary Islands to be of an Eastern component and not a Northern one. In addition, we have had the entry of a mass of continental air at low levels and above that stability that the ridges promote and it has been very persistent, and causes that characteristic of very dry air, we do not have cloudiness, and direct sunshine increases temperatures », explains the Aemet delegate in the Canary Islands, David Suárez.
González Alemán also reposted the geographer Dominic Royé who, when analyzing the data, pointed out that in the Canary Islands the first hundred days of the year 57 have marked “extreme temperatures.”
The scientist also points out that although El Niño “is weakening and we are on the way to La Niña, which will happen from the summer to the end of the year, and whose consequences are usually that there will be a cooling at the planetary level, probably as has happened in “2023, that year was a record temperature year, so we will probably not exceed those maximums but the long-term trend is lower due to the impact of climate change.”
[ad_2]
Original Source Link
