Spain has been chaining one temperature record after another for a week and the culprit, as we have been explaining, is a subtropical ridge that the country has maintained between five and ten degrees above normal. Nothing particularly surprising, nothing that hasn’t happened two dozen times in the last few years.
For complete the déjà vuIn fact, the same number has dragged a disproportionate amount of Saharan dust for days. And now, it’s time to suffer the consequences.
Never corner a DANA. As I said, we can describe the third week of April with three words: heat, stability and suspended dust. But starting on the 23rd the situation changes and a trough is becoming detached from the general circulation and It is going to be configured in the form of DANA. The party starts here.
The synoptic configuration is clear: a DANA in the southwest with the ridge still strong in the east and very warm air between the two structures. We have the basic ingredients of convection.
What can we expect? AEMET forecast stormy showers locally stronghail and very strong gusts of wind in almost the entire interior of the Peninsula. Today, the highest risk areas are the west and center of the peninsula (Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, western Andalusia), the Pyrenees and the Iberian System.
If everything continues as it is, April will end up as the third warmest month on record and all that atmospheric energy will be channeled over the land. To put it in perspective: all this is going to cause average temperatures to drop more than 14 degrees in a matter of days.
What does the heat have to do with the storm? Physicists use the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to explain that the atmosphere’s capacity to retain water vapor grows by approximately 7% for each degree of warming. The hotter, the more water vapor; more water vapor, (if the conditions are right) wilder storms.
It is true that we are experiencing an unusual April… but the average temperature in Spain has risen 1.69 °C between 1961 and 2024 and heat waves last three days per decade. That is, the “outside the norm” in this case It means things are changing. and what we are going to experience (the passage from the 36 to the flood) is the new normal.
Image | BenBaso | Xataka
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