Spain experienced its hottest January this year since records began in 1961, with temperatures approaching thirty degrees in the east of the country, the meteorological agency’s spokesperson announced on Tuesday ( Aemet).
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“It’s official. January was the hottest in the historic series in Spain,” Rubén del Campo said on the social network X.
The average temperature recorded last month in mainland Spain (8.4 degrees) was 2.4 degrees higher than the usual average and 0.4 degrees higher than the last record January in 2016, Aemet said in a communicated.
Spain experienced temperatures of around 30°C at the end of January, a heat wave worthy of the start of summer and described as an “anomaly” by Aemet.
The mercury thus rose in the last week of January to 29.5°C in the region of Valencia (east), to 28.5°C in that of Murcia (south-east) and 27.8°C near Malaga, in the south of Andalusia.
Nearly 400 weather stations in the country, or almost one in two, had seen temperatures reach or exceed 20°C, a level “proper to the middle or end of June”, i.e. say “summer”, Aemet then underlined.
If January “was a rainy month overall, the distribution of rain was very uneven: it was where we needed the most precipitation that it rained the least,” said Rubén del Field.
Barcelona and its outskirts were also placed in a state of drought “emergency” last week, with the establishment of new water consumption limits for nearly six million inhabitants and strong restrictions in particular for industry and agriculture.
The level of reservoirs in this northeastern region of the country, which store rainwater for use during drier months, has fallen below 16%.
Periods without rain are not atypical in this Mediterranean region, but the current precipitation deficit is unprecedented since records began in 1916.
Accustomed to high temperatures, Spain is faced with increasingly numerous and frequent heat episodes, sometimes outside the summer months, which worry scientists.
The country had already recorded unusually high temperatures in December, with a peak of 29.9°C in Malaga which was a national record for the month of December.