Spain will experience this week an exceptional heat wave for this time of year, with highs of 40ºC expected in Andalusia (south), while the entire territory suffers a prolonged drought with catastrophic consequences for agriculture. According to Aemet, temperatures will exceed 30ºC this Tuesday and Wednesday in much of the south of the country, with possible maximums of 35ºC in Andalusia, as well as in the regions of Valencia and Murcia, on the Mediterranean coast.
The country will experience values ??”typical of summer and exceptionally high for these dates,” the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) warned in a statement. This heat wave, linked to the “progressive entry of a mass of very hot and dry air, of African origin, over the Peninsula and the Balearic Islands”, will reach its culminating point at the end of the week in the south of the country, the public body specified. .
Then they will continue to rise, reaching “generally 35°C” on Thursday and Friday in the southern half of the country and in the Ebro valley (northeast), and up to “40°C” is expected in the Guadalquivir valley, in Andalusia. .
According to Aemet, this week’s temperatures will be on average between 6º and 10ºC above the norm for the season.
But in some places, they will even be between “15 and 20 degrees” above normal values ??by the end of April, agency spokesman Rubén del Campo said on Twitter.
The heat wave comes as part of an unusually hot and dry spring in Spain, especially in Catalonia (northeast), which is facing its worst drought in decades, where authorities have already issued orders to reduce water use.
Due to the lack of rainfall, reservoirs – which store rainwater for use in the drier months – are at only a quarter of their capacity in the region, according to local authorities. And many farmers have had to give up planting in recent weeks.
“We are in a difficult moment from the hydrological point of view”, especially since the groundwater tables and reservoirs in Spain have been depleted in recent years due to a chronic lack of rainfall, as acknowledged last week by the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas.
According to data from the European Copernicus service published on Thursday, Europe, where temperatures rise twice the global average, experienced its hottest summer since records began in 1950.
In a statement, the Asaja agrarian employers also raised the alarm. “The dimensions of the drought are tremendous”, and the situation in the Spanish countryside “is chaotic”, with forecasts of great losses in cereal and oilseed crops, stressed the employers’ association.
According to Coag, the main agrarian union, 60% of Spanish farmland is currently “suffocated” due to lack of rainfall.
“The drought already suffocates 60% of the Spanish countryside and produces irreversible losses in more than 3.5 million hectares of dryland cereals,” Coag estimated.
According to Aemet, this early heat wave, coupled with strong winds and very low humidity, will increase the risk of fires in the coming days, when firefighters have already fought several large forest fires since the end of March.
According to the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis), Spain has already broken the record for burned area since the beginning of the year, with 54,000 hectares affected as of April 23, compared to 17,126 hectares on the same date in 2022. record year of fires.
A European country on the front line of climate change, with almost 75% of its territory in the process of desertification according to the UN, Spain experienced the hottest year in its history last year, with several heat waves, according to Aemet.
This phenomenon, linked according to experts to the acceleration of global warming, has brought the issue of water to the forefront of the political scene in recent days in the country, against the background of the electoral campaign for the regional elections at the end of May and the legislative ones scheduled for the end of the year.
Spain must “review” the way in which it manages this “increasingly scarce resource”, said the president of the socialist government, Pedro Sánchez, last week, despite the fact that 80% of the country’s water is currently used for agriculture, in particular to fruits and vegetables destined for export.
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