Particularly high temperatures for the season, which could locally exceed 30°C, are expected this weekend in the south of France. This episode illustrates a broader phenomenon, marked by summers which should tend to spread out.
A heat peak will hit the south of France on Saturday April 6. Forecasters expect up to 6°C above seasonal norms, or even more locally. According to Sébastien Léas, forecaster at Météo-France, the 30°C mark risks being exceeded. Precocity records for these “threshold crossings” could thus be beaten.
From Saturday, very hot air will rise from Africa, causing this sharp rise in mercury. This is indeed a heat peak, and not a wave, because temperatures will drop “fast enough”, underlines Météo-France. Some localities, like Paris, will quickly lose up to ten degrees. However, temperatures will remain above seasonal norms.
Winters shortened, springs nibbled
In France, the first quarter of 2024 (January, February and March) was the hottest ever recorded since records began, underlines Sébastien Léas. On February 4, a heat record was reached in Céret (Pyrénées-Orientales) with 27.5°C, a temperature worthy of the month of May.
This trend is also visible in other European countries. Records for the month of March were, for example, broken in the Baltic countries: 25.5°C in Lithuania, 22.8°C in Latvia and 21.3°C in Estonia, the BBC reported on Monday. In June 2023, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Copernicus Observatory explained that Europe was warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.
By 2100, in a climate warmed by greenhouse gases linked to human activity, winter will be condensed into just a few weeks, specialists explained to franceinfo in January. The summer season will extend, both before and after its usual period. As a result, spring will tend to be nibbled, with the first summer temperatures earlier and earlier in the year. This dynamic is ongoing, and has already begun.
The Earth still warmed by the El Niño phenomenon
In January, the Copernicus Observatory announced that 2023 was the hottest year on record. With an average temperature set at 14.98°C on a global scale, it surpasses 2016 (14.81°C). “Temperatures recorded in 2023 are likely to exceed those of any period for at least 100 000 years”the deputy director of the Copernicus service on climate change, Samantha Burgess, insisted to franceinfo.
The year 2023 was marked by El Niño, a natural phenomenon characterized by an increase in water surface temperature in the eastern Pacific. Occurring in an irregular cycle that varies from three to seven years, El Niño is so powerful that it impacts the climate across the Earth. Being able to cause episodes of drought and precipitation well above normal, it above all causes an increase in temperatures on a global scale. Before 2023, the previous warmest year, 2016, was also the year when the last El Niño hit.
Scientists anticipated new temperature records with the return of the phenomenon. However, the latter has not yet completely disappeared and its effects are still being felt. It was 48.5°C in Kayes (Mali) on Wednesday, a “absolute national record” for the country, reported Etienne Kapikian, forecaster at Météo-France, citing data collected by Thierry Goose, climate specialist living in Canada.
The African continent has been hit by a heat wave since March “exceptional”with peaks at 45°C. “After the El Niño we had, the African continent is fairly uniformly hot, but especially in the north and south of the Congolese basin, throughout the Sahel and in West Africa”observed climatologist Benjamin Pohl, researcher at the Biogeosciences Institute of the University of Burgundy. “The Indian Ocean sometimes responds to the El Niño phenomenon and warms in its western part, which creates a new source of heat, mainly affecting southern Africa and East Africa, this time.”
The animation from the Copernicus Observatory below illustrates the importance of the heat that hit the continent in March.
On Tuesday, hundreds of schools in the Philippines, including several dozen in the capital, Manila, closed due to the extreme heat, AFP noted. The thermometer reached 35.7°C in the capital, a little below the historic heat record of 38.6°C measured on May 17, 1915. Usually, the months of March, April and May are the driest in many large areas of the Philippines, a tropical country.
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“Two conditions are necessary to break records: a long-term trend, which is the rise in average temperatures linked to the increase in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and a more cyclical event linked to variability natural climate. These are now united”underlined at the end of March Samuel Somot, researcher at Météo-France, interviewed by the newspaper The world.
El Niño will be followed by its cold side, called La Niña. Before this, a neutral period is normally expected on a planetary scale. In the context of warming, this refreshing trend could however have more difficulty expressing itself. The World Meteorological Organization also stated in March that La Nina could develop “later this year”. The head of the monitoring service of this body estimated that there is “a high probability that 2024 will break the 2023 record” in terms of temperatures.