with VideoThere is a high pressure area over Spain, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. The heat wave in Italy could even break the European heat record. This is the first major heat wave to hit Italy this year, following a spring and early summer marked by storms and flooding.
Axel Peters
Latest update:
6:48 pm
An anticyclone — a high-pressure area — called Cerberus will push temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius in much of Italy on Wednesday. It will be hottest on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia: it can reach 47 to 48 degrees there.
The record for the highest temperature in European history was broken on August 11, 2021, when a temperature of 48.8 degrees Celsius was recorded in Foridia, an Italian town in the Sicilian province of Syracause.
“We know there will be temperatures above 40 or 45 degrees Celsius,” said Luca Mercalli, the president of the Italian Meteorological Association. “We can get close to the record. Anyway, the levels will be very high.”
The intense heat is expected to last for about two weeks in central and southern Italy, while easing slightly in the north.
Also in other countries heat wave
France, Germany, Spain and Poland are also affected by a heat wave. In Spain – where they are experiencing the second heat wave of the summer – temperatures can rise to 44 degrees in parts of the country. The Red Cross has therefore urged people to be extra careful and to pay attention to people who are most vulnerable to the high temperatures, such as children and the elderly.
Last week was the hottest week ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Friday already broke the daily temperature record and June was already the warmest June to date. The United Nations scientists warn of ‘potentially devastating consequences’ for ecosystems and the environment.
These are still preliminary data, but it was extremely warm all last week. On Monday, the global temperature record was immediately broken with 17.01 degrees Celsius. That was 16.94 degrees, measured in 2016. But that record was set again a day later and again on Thursday, before the highest temperature was measured on Friday: 17.24 degrees Celsius.
According to the WMO, the heat coincides with the onset of El Niño, the natural phenomenon that warms the Pacific Ocean. The global temperature is expected to rise as a result and more weather records will be broken. The scientists argue that climate change amplifies the effect of El Niño.
Study: Summer heat killed more than 61,000 Europeans in 2022
During the exceptionally hot European summer of 2022, more than 61,000 people died as a result of the heat. That is one of the results of a Monday in the magazine Natural Medicine published study.
The researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and the French health research institute Inserm estimate that 61,672 deaths were linked to the heat between May 30 and September 4 last year. Italy had the highest heat-related death toll with 18,010, followed by Spain with 11,324 and Germany with 8,173.
People over the age of 80 were in the majority in the deaths, the study said. About 63 percent of the people who died from the heat were women. The difference between men and women widened after the age of 80. In that group, women had a mortality rate that was 27 percent higher.
Unless something is done to protect people from rising temperatures, Europe will experience an average of more than 68,000 heat-related deaths each summer by 2030, the study estimates. By 2040, there would be an average of more than 94,000 heat-related deaths. By 2050, the number could even rise above 120,000, the researchers said.
Previous research has shown that Europe is warming about twice as fast as the global average. While the world has warmed by an average of almost 1.2 degrees Celsius since the mid-nineteenth century, Europe was about 2.3 degrees warmer last year than in pre-industrial times.
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