The temperature of the Mediterranean Sea reached 28.9°C on Thursday, a record high

The new record comes after a scorching July across a large part of the Mediterranean basin, also hit by heatwaves, drought and fires, such as the exceptional ones in Greece in August.

A record we could have done without. The daily median temperature of the Mediterranean Sea surface reached an unprecedented value of 28.9°C on Thursday, August 15, beating the record of 28.71°C measured on July 24, 2023, said Justino Martinez, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute of Marine Sciences and the Catalan institute Icatmar, on Friday. These preliminary readings come from satellite data from the maritime service of the European Copernicus Observatory, which goes back to 1982.

“The maximum temperature of August 15 was reached on the Egyptian coast in El-Arish (31.96ºC)”but “this value should be taken with caution” before further human verification, the researcher said.

The record was also broken for the average daily temperature (28.56°C on August 15 against 28.40°C on July 24, 2023), according to Justino Martinez, but this measurement is less relevant than the median temperature because it is more strongly disturbed by very atypical readings in isolated points of the Mediterranean.

The new record comes after a scorching July across a large part of the Mediterranean basin, also hit by heatwaves, drought and fires, such as the exceptional ones in Greece in August.

For two successive summers, the Mediterranean has thus been warmer than during the exceptionally hot summer of 2003, when a daily median was measured at 28.25°C on August 23, a record that had stood for twenty years. These temperatures threaten marine life, favoring invasive species and increasing the potential intensity of precipitation in a region particularly affected by the effects of global warming.