According to Météo-France, new records could be broken on Saturday, 2022 being the hottest year ever recorded in the country.
by Perrine Mouterde
Heat records until the very last hours. Like the whole year, the last day of 2022 promises to be “excessively hot”. He could do 23 ° C in Dax (Landes), in the South West, and 16 ° C in Paris. The average temperatures announced are 16 ° C for the northern part of the country, and 18 ° C for the south. “We will most certainly have the hottest December 31 since the start of the measures in 1947, specifies Frédéric Nathan, forecastist at Météo-France. The temperature anomaly at the country scale could exceed 8 ° C, which is huge “. In seventy-five years, the temperature recorded has so far exceeded the daily average of 8 ° C only three times.
The Christmas period was also abnormally soft, the average temperature of December 24 and 25 having been the highest ever recorded. Until 27, however, December remained in normal on a national scale, the cold peak observed at the beginning of the month “compensating” the high temperatures. But with the winter heat wave arrived on Wednesday, which will increase until the end of the year, December returns above average. The first days of January 2023 should remain particularly soft.
From the end of November, Météo-France had announced that the hot 2022 would ever be recorded in the country, far exceeding the previous 2020 record. Repeated heat waves, waves of early and late warmth, multiplication of records of temperatures … “Punctuated by climatic extremes, 2022 is a symptom of climate change”, underlined the body.
The new period of sweetness is explained by the influence of a very hot air mass which goes up from the south, driven by a depressional episode parked above the Atlantic Ocean. “When there are low pressure areas in England, Portugal or on Azores, this pushes Africa’s winds to Spain and France, explains Davide Faranda, CNRS researcher at the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute . This creates a kind of “treadmill” phenomenon that carries heat and allows you to reach temperature records. “
winter heat
Climate disruption, caused by human activities and in particular by the combustion of fossil fuels (petroleum, gas, coal), has already caused heating of the planet of 1.2 ° C. Consequence of this phenomenon, which affects all regions of the globe, the subtropical air that arrives in France is much warmer than thirty or fifty years ago. “This atmospheric circulation is not completely abnormal but with climate change, a vague of classic sweetness can quickly become exceptional, confirms Gerhard Krinner, climatologist and research director at CNRS. Warming is overwhelmed on the variability of the weather.”
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