ISLAMABAD: Spain’s meteorological agency confirmed on Monday that peninsular Spain registered its hottest October day on record.
The town of Montoro in Cordoba sweltered through 38.2 C (100.8 F) heat on Sunday evening, handily overtaking the previous October record of 37.5 C set in Marbella in 2014.
In what AEMET says is likely the hottest start to an October across Spain since record-keeping began, 40% of the country’s weather stations saw highs above 32 C on Sunday.
Also, in another first for October, parts of Spain are under a heat alert on Monday.
The extremely dry and hot conditions are set to continue throughout the week.
While the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts predicts hotter-than-usual temperatures throughout the vast majority of Europe this week, most of Spain will see temperatures between 3 C and 6 C warmer than average, with some parts seeing week-long anomalies of up to 10 C.
Two of Spain’s top meteorologists agreed that Spain’s summers are simply getting longer due to climate change.
On Monday, Roberto Granda, a meteorologist in El Tiempo, published a report explaining how summers in Spain have increased by an average of 20 to 30 days since 1960. Where there have been records for the last 100 years, the average lengths of summers increased by an average of two months.
For the study, Granda defines summers as the first and last weeks of the year when the average high temperatures exceed the 75th percentile of the average highs from 1991 to 2020.