France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales.
Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020.
“The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin.
Photo: AFP
All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer.
“Our country had never before reached such high temperatures at this time of year; numerous monthly records were broken,” the weather service said.
France’s soils, which were very wet at the beginning of spring, had become “very dry” by the end of the season due to the heatwave and a lack of rainfall, the weather service said.
France, Britain and Portugal all reported their hottest-ever May days as a “heat dome” of warm air from northern Africa pushed temperatures well above normal levels across western Europe.
It was the hottest ever spring for England and Wales, but just the third overall for the UK, the UK meteorological office said on Monday.
In some locations, temperature records were exceeded by 2°C as the heat wave helped drive “an exceptional end to the season,” the UK weather service said.
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute on Tuesday announced the country’s hottest spring since record keeping began in 1901.
The Scandinavian nation escaped the late May heat wave, but average temperatures were still 2.1°C above the seasonal norm, the institute said, with particular warmth in the country’s north.
Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth, in part because it is connected to the Arctic, where bright snow and ice is melting and revealing darker, heat-absorbing surfaces such as land and ocean.
Scientists agree that heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense as the planet warms due to human-caused climate change from burning fossil fuels.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Tuesday said there was an 80 percent change of a warming El Nino weather pattern forming between this month and August.
WMO secretary-general Celeste Saulo said the world needed to get ready for an El Nino which could “exacerbate drought and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of heat waves both on land and in the ocean”.
El Nino is half of a naturally occurring climate cycle that can temporarily drive up global temperatures and prime conditions for more extreme weather around the globe.
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