During the heat wave that swept the country, Italy seemed to have set the highest temperature in European history, with early reports showing a maximum temperature of 48.8 degrees Celsius.
If this is accepted World Meteorological Organization It will break the European record of 48C set in Athens in 1977. The temperature was measured at a monitoring station in Syracuse, Sicily, and was quickly confirmed by the island’s meteorological authorities.
This discovery was made during an extremely intense heat wave sweeping the Mediterranean to Tunisia and Algeria. The fire has been burning in most of the area for more than a week. The Italian government has declared a state of emergency. Turkey and Greece have also suffered devastating fires.
British meteorologist Trevor Mitchell (Trevor Mitchell) Bureau of Meteorology, Said: “Società Meteorologica Italiana said that the 48.8C temperature report is true. However, for such potential records, a verification process is usually required before the official announcement.
“Sicily has been experiencing heat waves in the past few days. Foehn effect [a change from wet, cold, conditions one side of a mountain to warmer, drier, conditions on the other] The temperature leeward of the mountains west of Syracuse may have contributed to the 48.8C observed there today. “
Scott Duncan, a Scottish meteorologist, said more high temperature records are inevitable. “The dangerous heat wave sweeping most of North Africa and southern Europe is unfolding. In the next few days, the focus of the heat will shift slightly to the west and north,” he wrote on Twitter.
The extreme heat in Europe is the latest unpopular record to hit the northern hemisphere this summer. Temperature records in Canada, the western United States, Finland, Estonia, Turkey and Moscow have been broken. Unprecedented floods swept parts of Germany and China. The Siberian taiga, the largest forest in the world, is burning record wildfires.
Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Agency, said that the trees that were set ablaze in the Sakha Republic of Russia this year released 208 megatons of carbon, almost twice the amount recorded last year. He said that on a global scale, last month was the month with the worst carbon emissions from fires on record.
Climate scientists have long predicted that fossil fuel emissions from vehicles, factories, and deforestation will lead to more extreme weather. The latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Released on Monday, Said that this connection is clear and irreversible, but if the government acts quickly, the more serious impact may be reduced.
“This is climate change in 3D. It is here,” said Irving Gaffney, an analyst at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “We are fundamentally changing the climate system, so hot areas will become hotter and humid areas will become wetter. We will become more extreme.”
Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Institute of Environmental Change at the University of Oxford, said that extreme weather, especially extreme high temperatures, is occurring all over the world. “Climate change has arrived. There are some things we can prevent from getting worse, but a lot of changes have already taken place here.”
