Spain has broken a new heat record for the summer. It has just experienced its “hottest” August on record with an average temperature of 25°C, the national meteorological agency Aemet announced.
“With an average temperature of 25ºC, it was 2ºC above the average recorded from 1991 to 2020” and exceeded “August 2003 and 2023 by two tenths of a degree.” The Augusts of those two years had been the warmest so far.
Based on data recorded in the first eight months of the year, 2024 is expected to be “the hottest year” in historical records, “tied with 2022,” Aemet adds. The four hottest years ever recorded in the country could all fall in the 2020s, it says. The years 2022 and 2024 have an average temperature of 15.8ºC, according to the same source, “They are closely followed by 2023 and 2020, with 15.7ºC.”
Europe is warming up
Although Spain is accustomed to high temperatures, it is facing increasingly frequent and frequent heat waves, sometimes outside the summer months, which worries scientists. In 2023, according to Aemet, the country experienced seven heat waves.
Since 1975, the duration of these episodes has increased by three days per decade in Spain, the agency points out. Caused by greenhouse gas emissions and human activity, global warming has increased the intensity, duration and frequency of heat waves. The phenomenon is particularly visible in Europe, a continent that is warming twice as fast as the global average and whose climate is already at least 1.2°C warmer than before the industrial era, according to the scientific community.
