Madrid (EFE).- The suffocating heat is not only felt on land. The waters of seas and oceans that surround Spain have registered very high values in recent days; Specifically, the temperature in coastal areas has reached 24.6 degrees Celsius, an unprecedented figure -for these dates- since 1940.
Said temperature, according to data from the Meteorological Agency (Aemet), is 2.2 degrees above normal for this time of year, although, according to Aemet, “there is still a way for the sea to continue warming up more”, because the maximum value is usually recorded in mid-August.
Those 24.6 degrees “far exceed the records of the two previously warmest years”, when in 2015 24 degrees were recorded and in 2022 it reached 23.7 degrees.
As an example, it should be noted that in the last hours in points of the Levante and the Balearic Islands the Mediterranean has exceeded 28 degrees, and in the Alborán area, the waters are between 3 and 4 degrees above normal.
Warming in the whole global ocean
This warming also affects the entire global ocean, which in June experienced the highest surface temperatures of any previous June, according to data from the European monitoring system Copernicus, which describes the marine heat waves recorded in recent weeks around Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Baltic Sea as “extreme”.
But the problem of the warming of marine waters could be extended over time: Copernicus warns that the temperatures for the August-September-October quarter are warmer than normal in practically all the land areas of the planet and in a good part of the oceans.
The Antarctic Ocean, with the lowest ice thickness ever seen, and the Atlantic, especially in its northern part, also suffer from this problem, a phenomenon on a global scale that poses a high risk of impact on ecosystems.
For Juan Jesús González, a researcher in atmospheric dynamics and AEMET meteorologist, warmer waters in the North Atlantic promote easier and faster evaporation, which contributes to oceanic storms becoming “larger and more intense” systems, with more intense rains, more floods and strong gusts of winds, among other impacts, on the peninsula.
Several factors to explain the warming of the sea
There are several factors that can explain this strange phenomenon of marine warming in Atlantic waters: on the one hand, those derived from climate change, among which an abnormal atmospheric circulation for the time stands out, the weakening of the Azores anticyclone and greenhouse gas emissions (…), and, on the other, the El Niño phenomenon.
El Niño, already officially declared by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), may be partly behind the warming of the Atlantic, details the expert, who explains that it is a natural phenomenon whereby the oceanic surface of the central and eastern Pacific reaches temperatures higher than normal near the equator, with effects beyond the area of occurrence.
To the increase in temperatures in the North Atlantic – the expert qualifies – other circumstances are added, such as various sources of irregular heating from marine areas in the west of the British Isles, southeast of Greenland, Cantabria and an area between the Canary Islands and Madeira, all associated with the same oddities in the behavior of atmospheric circulation.
The meteorologist also recalls that the oceans, the largest carbon sink on the planet, absorb a third of human carbon dioxide emissions and 90 percent of the excess heat generated by the increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
At this point, he regrets that even if GHG emissions stop, the oceans will continue to warm for decades, which would lead to a process of “even greater temperature increase”, to reach the end of this century with much warmer oceans.