As summers get longer, Spain smashes record for October heat

By Alyssa McMurtry

OVIEDO, Spain (AA) - Spain’s meteorological agency confirmed on Monday that peninsular Spain registered its hottest October day on record.

The town of Montoro in Cordoba sweltered through 38.2 C (100.8 F) heat on Sunday evening, handily overtaking the previous October record of 37.5 C set in Marbella in 2014.

In what AEMET says is likely the hottest start to an October across Spain since record-keeping began, 40% of the country’s weather stations saw highs above 32 C on Sunday.

Also, in another first for October, parts of Spain are under a heat alert on Monday.

The extremely dry and hot conditions are set to continue throughout the week.

While the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts predicts hotter-than-usual temperatures throughout the vast majority of Europe this week, most of Spain will see temperatures between 3 C and 6 C warmer than average, with some parts seeing week-long anomalies of up to 10 C.

Two of Spain’s top meteorologists agreed that Spain’s summers are simply getting longer due to climate change.

On Monday, Roberto Granda, a meteorologist in El Tiempo, published a report explaining how summers in Spain have increased by an average of 20 to 30 days since 1960. Where there have been records for the last 100 years, the average lengths of summers increased by an average of two months.

For the study, Granda defines summers as the first and last weeks of the year when the average high temperatures exceed the 75th percentile of the average highs from 1991 to 2020.

But it’s not just Spain.

Under the business-as-usual carbon emissions scenario, summers spanning nearly six months could become the new normal by 2100 in the Northern Hemisphere, according to a 2021 study in Geophysical Research Letters. Average winters would last less than two months.

“The changing seasonal clock signifies disturbed agriculture seasons and rhythm of species activities, more frequent heat waves, storms and wildfires, amounting to increased risks to humanity,” said the report in the prestigious journal.

At the moment, large areas of Spain are suffering from a prolonged drought, which is badly affecting many crops and driving up food prices.

On Monday, Fernando Miranda Sotillos, Spain’s secretary general of agriculture and food, warned that the price of olive oil will remain high for at least another year due to another season of bad harvests.

Spain is the world’s top producer of olive oil, typically accounting for around 45% of global exports.

In September, the US Department of Agriculture said that the concerns in Spain have sent prices to record levels and warned that extreme weather in the Mediterranean means global olive oil production has likely fallen 25% below the five-year average this year.