The record was validated on Tuesday by the World Meteorological Organization, more than two years after its recording in Sicily.
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The new temperature record in continental Europe is 48.8 degrees. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed, Tuesday January 30, this figure reached in August 2021, in Sicily (Italy). On August 11, 2021, an automatic sensor installed near Syracuse recorded this record figure of 48.8 degrees. Italy then lives, like a part of southern Europe, under a dome of heat which has been making the thermometer rise for several days.
It took two and a half years for the international experts brought together by the WMO to validate this new continental maximum, the time, in particular, to check the proper functioning of the sensor and the data recorder, to certify its good calibration in relation to the standards in force. “These extremes are snapshots of our current climate, explains Randall Cerveny, climate and weather extremes rapporteur for the WMO. And it is possible, even likely, that even more serious extremes will occur in Europe in the future.”
According to the WMO, the previous European record dated from 1977 with 48° reached in Greece, in the cities of Athens and Eleusis. In France, the maximum ever recorded dates from June 21, 2019 with 46° in Vérargues, commune of Hérault, northeast of Montpellier.
