Metropolitan France has not experienced real rain for 31 days, announces Météo-France on Tuesday, February 21. An absence of precipitation which equals the very recent record of 2020 and compromises the recovery of groundwater tables, depleted by the historic drought of last year. Since January 21, even if it has been able to rain punctually in certain places, the cumulative rainfall aggregated throughout the metropolis has been less than 1 mm every day.
It has therefore been 31 days without rain, which is as much as between March 17 and April 16, 2020, in the midst of the first confinement of Covid-19. If the lack of rain continues on Tuesday, the record will be broken, but the series should anyway end on Wednesday with a “lightly rainy episode” announced for the whole country by Météo-France.
This episode had already eclipsed the previous record for winter months (22 days in 1989), during this crucial period for groundwater recharge. Whatever happens, “February 2023 is expected to end with a rainfall deficit of more than 50%, becoming one of the driest Februarys on record since measurements began in 1959”, announced Meteo-France Monday. This lack of rain “is mainly linked to the anticyclonic conditions since the end of January which have acted as a kind of shield” against rain disturbances, explains Simon Mittelberger, climatologist at Météo-France.
But beyond the singular episode, it is the recurrence of the phenomenon and the context that are worrying, illustrating the forecasts of UN experts on global warming linked to human activities. “France is experiencing a worrying meteorological drought”, recalls on the one hand Météo-France: “Since August 2021, all months have had a rain deficit with the exception of December 2021, June 2022 and September 2022.”
Moreover, this chronic deficit continues after heat waves and exceptional soil drought in the summer of 2022, other symptoms of climate change. Almost all of the metropolitan departments had been placed on drought alert, with water restrictions for watering, irrigating or washing your car. But at the time, the seriousness of the situation had been tempered by a previous wet winter in most regions, which had allowed the aquifers to be recharged.
At the beginning of 2023, conversely, their filling is late. In January, the Bureau of Geological and Mining Research (BRGM) already said it was “quite pessimistic” about the availability next summer of groundwater, which provides two-thirds of drinking water and one-third of agricultural irrigation. . If rain is so rare in 2023, “we will come to a much worse situation than what we experienced in late summer 2022,” the office warned. In fact, the record lack of rain in the spring of 2020 was followed by the driest summer on record at ground level. With the exception of 2021, the soil drought indicator has also reached a new record every summer since 2018.
As a sign of concern, the government convened its “first hydrological anticipation and monitoring committee of the year” on Thursday as “conflicts of use” loom, i.e. tensions between the needs of agriculture, hydroelectricity production in dams, recreation (golf, canoeing, etc.) or the health of ecosystems. Announced for the end of January, the government’s long-awaited water management plan has been postponed for several weeks.
In the meantime, departments are already suffering: the Pyrénées-Orientales have been on continuous drought alert since June, suffering repeated fires in the middle of winter. And the majority of Var was in turn placed on drought alert on Friday. On the other side of the border, in Catalonia, water reserves are currently only 28.7% of their capacity, compared to an average of 72% over the past ten years, according to the latest national hydrological bulletin.
