Starting on Thursday, June 11, an anticyclone will channel a very warm air mass from North Africa. Temperatures are going to rise, yes; but that’s only part of the story.
The other part is the sun: an almost solstitial solar radiation that will heat (a lot) that already hot air mass. And we are going to notice it throughout the country, but Galicia is surely going to take the cake.
According to some meteorologists, the entire community will be between 30 and 40 degrees this Saturday. And, curiously, it is not the most striking thing.
The second episode of extraordinary heat in three weeks. The most striking thing is the position of the event on the calendar and its recurrence. After all, it comes after the warmest May ever recorded in the community and a few days after Health has had to raise the heat risk threshold one degree in Ourense. Galicia is warming up.
But not purely because of the situation. It is something more structural. The thermal calendar has been shifting for some time and we have reached the point where the ‘Atlantic façade’ has ceased to be a synonym for climate refuge very quickly.
And that makes the problem more serious. I was talking before about health risk thresholds. For the Ministry, which has just updated them, that line is 26 degrees for A Coruña. A temperature that in the south would even be pleasant.
The issue has never been that temperatures rise (which they do too), nor even that we are not prepared for them. The bottom line is that we can’t prepare because it’s expensive, it’s slow and, in fact, we’re not even really aware that we have to do it.
Benbaso
What is going to happen in the next few days? A classic summer combination, Juan Taboada, coordinator of MeteoGalicia, explained it.: a mass of very warm air stagnated by the position of an anticyclone, stability, clear skies and a fair sun. In the words of AEMET“midsummer temperatures (…) starting Thursday.”
However, the most intense moment will be between Friday and Saturday. In fact, even with storms in Ourense, 35 degrees are expected without a problem.
The ‘other’ problem. Because, in coastal areas, the problem is not only the air mass, the sun and stability. The ‘other’ problem is all the buoys of Galicia and the Cantabrian Sea marked historical maximums (with anomalies between 1.5 and 2 degrees above the average).
That is what is going to mean that the sea will not be able to soften the temperatures either.
Image | BenBaso
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