The summer of 2023 will be very hot throughout Spain, particularly in the Canary and Balearic archipelagos, and will probably be rainier and stormier than usual in most of the country, especially in the Mediterranean, according to the seasonal forecast of the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET).
During the AEMET’s quarterly press conference, its spokesman, Rubén del Campo, predicted that there is a “high probability” of having a summer “not only hot, but very hot” throughout the country, and this probability is even higher in both archipelagos. With regard to rainfall, he pointed out that this greater sign of rain means that “perhaps the storms will be more abundant” than in other years.
Thus, he specifies that there is no clear trend in rainfall for the months of June, July and August in Galicia, the Cantabrian and the Canary Islands, while he notes a signal of between 40 and 50 percent that the summer will be wetter than normal, especially on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic side of Andalusia.
However, the probability of below-normal in the quarter is 20 to 25 percent.
“This is significant, bearing in mind that in the summer there is not usually very high rainfall,” said the spokesman who, in any case, does not believe that this rainfall will be so abundant as to alleviate the current situation of meteorological and hydrological drought.
Specifically, the forecast models give a June-August quarter with between 50 and 60 percent more probability of it being warmer than normal on the Peninsula and up to 70 percent in the archipelagos, compared to a percentage of probability of between 10 and 20 percent of it being colder than normal.
Thus, the summer of 2023 will come after the warmest spring since records have been kept in Spain, as the months from March to May were extremely warm, resulting in an average temperature in Spain of 14.2 degrees Celsius, which is almost 2ºC warmer (1.8ºC) than the average for the reference period (1991-2020) and even 0.3ºC warmer than the spring of 1997, which until now was the warmest spring in Spain since 1961.
“We are almost getting used to talking about ‘the warmest in the historical series’ because in the last four seasons, three have been the warmest: the summer of 2022, the autumn of 2022 and the spring of 2023”, he pointed out, and this 2023 could be among the “five, six or seven warmest of the last 30 years” in Spain.
The spokesman recalls that the spring of 1997 “was tremendous and unusual” and insists that the spring of 2023 has surpassed it and it is becoming customary for “things that seemed unusual to be surpassed all too often”.
In this way, he indicated that the warmest spring in the series has had an anomaly of 1.8ºC in the Peninsula; 0.7ºC in the Balearic Islands and 1.9ºC in the Canary Islands, where it has also been “extraordinarily warm”. There was only one cold period at the beginning of March, when there were some intense frosts.
In the Canary Islands, in fact, there was an episode of high temperatures that reached 38.2ºC in March in the village of San Nicolás (Gran Canaria), the highest temperature ever recorded in Spain in the month of March. All in all, March 2023 was the third warmest March in the series.
Regarding April, Del Campo indicates that it was also the warmest April in the series, with an anomaly of 3ºC and an episode of high temperatures that almost reached 39ºC in the Guadalquivir valley; 38.8ºC in Cordoba, which is the highest value in Spain during the fourth month of the year since records have been kept. Between the 25th and 29th, all the days were the warmest for those dates since at least 1950.
However, he adds that May was “a little different” as it began with high temperatures that fell from the 12th, when a situation of greater cloudiness began, with cold air in the upper layers of the atmosphere, storms that caused the thermometers to be “very contained”.
Thus, May was a normal month as a whole, but with “marked differences” between the first ten days, which were a warm period, and the rest of the month, with temperatures below normal in Spain as a whole.
DRY SPRING FOLLOWED BY VERY HOT SUMMER
With regard to rainfall, the AEMET spokesman confirms that it was “very dry”, specifically the second driest in the entire historical series after 1995, with a rainfall in the country as a whole of 95 litres per square metre, which is just over half (53%) of the 1991-2020 reference period, little more than the 85 litres per square metre recorded in the spring months of 1995. “These are the only cases since at least 1961 in which we have not accumulated at least 100 litres per square metre in spring,” he stressed.
By months, he points out that March was a “very dry” month in which it rained barely 36 percent of normal, making it the sixth driest month in the historical series. This was followed by April, which turned out to be “extremely dry”, with rainfall barely more than a fifth of normal, making it the driest April since records began.
The third month of spring, May, ended with a “normal” character as a result of the continuous showers that were recorded almost across the peninsula and the Balearic Islands during the second half of the month.
Del Campo regrets that despite these May rains, given the “very dry” nature of the spring of 2023, the meteorological drought season in which the country as a whole has been in since the winter of 2021 to 2022 continues, and the long-term drought – which takes into account the previous 36 months – that began at the end of 2022 persists.
“This is what the IPPC indicates in its composite effects reports: high temperatures and drought at the same time,” says the spokesman, who points out that the current drought could be the longest-lasting and most intense drought since historical records have been kept in Spain.
After the second half of May, which has been rainy, the forecast that predicts a rainier than normal summer, especially due to storms, could begin to alleviate the situation, but in any case, “even though it could be a stormier summer than normal”, he predicts that the water reserve and the water reservoir will continue to fall, due to the greater heat, the greater evaporation and the increase in demand for water during the summer.
Therefore, he calculates that in order to alleviate the drought situation in autumn it would have to rain 20 percent more than normal, something that “rarely happens”.
