Madrid (EFE)
At a press conference to advance the weather characteristics for this spring and the prediction for the next three months, the spokesman for the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet), Rubén del Campo, explained that the odds point to a summer that is not only warm, but “very warm”, and stormy.
“We cannot yet know if it will be hotter than last year’s summer, but it could be among the 5 hottest in the last 30 years,” the spokesperson explained.
Regarding the rains for this summer season, which will last approximately 93 days and 16 hours, and will end on September 23 with the beginning of autumn, the precipitation, except for the Bay of Biscay and the Canary Islands, where there is no clear trend, will be between 40 or 50 percent above the average for this time.
Despite this, he regretted that the reality is that in summer, even if it rains, rainfall is usually not abundant enough to alleviate situations of meteorological drought and “we will have to wait until autumn” to see how the water scarcity situation evolves.
Spring has been the warmest in the historical series
On the other hand, and with respect to spring, from Aemet they have highlighted that it is the warmest of the historical series, whose start is located in 1961: It has behaved “extremely warm”, with a temperature in mainland Spain of 14.2 degrees, and 0.3 degrees higher than the warmest so far, which was that of the year 1997.
The months of March and April have shown very warm behavior: March was the third warmest in the series, while April had an average temperature 3 degrees higher than the normal average, and there was also a “significant episode of high temperatures” at end of the month.
At this point, Del Campo has highlighted that between April 25 and 29, all days were “the warmest for those dates since at least 1950”; Córdoba reached a maximum temperature of 38.8 degrees, the highest recorded in mainland Spain in April.
May, on the other hand, was a normal month as a whole, although with marked differences between the first ten days, which made up a warm period, and the rest of the month, with temperatures generally below normal in Spain as a whole. .
Regarding rainfall, it was the second driest spring in the historical series with an accumulated rainfall in mainland Spain of 95 liters per square meter, a figure that corresponds only to 53 percent of the normal value within the reference period 1991- 2020.
The Aemet has confirmed that “only the spring of 1995, with 85 liters per square meter, was drier than that of 2023, and they are the only cases, since at least 1961, in which at least 100 liters are not accumulated per square meter in spring.
However, Del Campo has affirmed that given the very dry nature of the spring, at the end of said season “Spain continued in the situation of meteorological drought that began in the winter of 2021-2022”, in addition to the long-term drought (corresponding to the analysis of the precipitations of the previous thirty-six months) that began at the end of last year.
For months, March was very dry, with rainfall only reaching 36 percent of its normal value, the sixth driest in the series, and April was extremely dry, with rainfall barely exceeding a fifth of normal, the drier since there are records.
May has closed with a normal balance, especially due to the continuous showers that occurred, almost universally, in the peninsular territory and the Balearic Islands, during the second half of the month.