In coastal cities such as Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga temperatures were in the high 20s on Wednesday October 26th, with people still seen sunbathing on the beaches and swimming in the sea at a time of year when jackets are usually worn in Spain.
Further south in the Andalusian cities of Córdoba, Seville and Granada, the mercury on Thursday will hit 32 degrees centigrade. In the town of Morón de la Frontera, famed for beating summer heat records, it will be 34 C.
We won’t yet know until the end of the month whether this truly will be the hottest October on record in Spain, but what we do know is that on October 19th, weather reporters were already saying that it was the second hottest octubre since 1950.
There are two other fairly recent Octobers that were the hottest so far – 2014 and 2017 where the average temperatures were 18.7C and 18.5C respectively.
Spain’s State Meteorological Agency Aemet said in a Tweet: “it’s very unusual for the time and we are not ruling out that this October will be the warmest in Spain on record”.
Although last weekend (October 22nd and 23rd), much of the peninsula experienced a drop in temperatures with the arrival of storms Armand and Béatrice, it’s still abnormally warm across most of Spain for this time of year.
Earlier in the month AEMET spokesman Rubén del Campo analysed the first 17 days of October and concluded that “so far, it’s second warmest October in Spain since records began “, with temperatures 2.1ºC above normal.
READ ALSO – ‘2.7C above normal’: Spain registers hottest month on record
Así pues, parece muy probable que octubre de 2022 acabe siendo el más cálido de la serie, con cierta diferencia además con respecto a 2017, el 2º más cálido. pic.twitter.com/5PPE6SmwYs
— AEMET (@AEMET_Esp) October 26, 2022
Autumns are disappearing
It seems that autumn seasons are slowly getting shorter in Spain, with summer heat eating into standard autumn weather.
“If in the 80s the summer lasted three months, we can now say that it will last four,”, AEMET spokesman, Rubén del Campo, warned three years ago. This year the spokesman confirmed, “If the normal period of a summer is three months, now it lasts approximately four months and 10 days”.
Summer is not only getting longer, but starting earlier too, also eating in springtime. Evidence of this could be seen this year, when Spain experienced one of the hottest Mays on record with unusually high temperatures of 30C across much of the country.
Some places such as Jaén even saw the mercury go up to a sweltering 40.5C in May.
A new term has been coined to describe the new season – veroño, a mix between the Spanish verano or summer and otoño or autumn.
#FelizMiércoles. Puedes ver el video con la predicción oficial de #AEMET para hoy (y los próximos días) en https://t.co/tA3McZq3fK pic.twitter.com/g5jLz1t4QW
— AEMET (@AEMET_Esp) October 26, 2022
What is the forecast for the end of October and the beginning of November?
Antena 3 weather reporter Roberto Brasero said that during the end of October, it will continue to rain heavily in the west of Galicia, as well as some regions of Castilla y León and Extremadura, but that across most of the country Wednesday (27th) and Thursday (28th) will be very hot days.
The thermometer will be between 5-10C higher than normal. Cities like Bilbao, Jaén and Albacete will even reach 30C, while in Murcia and Córdoba the mercury is forecast to reach 32C, a temperature more likely to be seen in July or August.
There is also a possibility of some tropical nights with temperatures above 20C in various parts of the peninsula. In the Mediterranean, for example, the thermostat is not expected to drop to below 20C, while in the Canary Islands the minimum will be around 28C.
Looking forward to next month, Del Campo said: “Warmer-than-normal conditions are likely to continue into the first half of November”.
Not just in Spain
The AEMET spokesman explained that except for some interruptions at the end of May and at the end of September, the conditions have been practically summery (with high temperatures and low rainfall) from the beginning of May to mid-October. “It’s something exceptional,” he said.
But this is not just happening in Spain, other countries in Europe are also experiencing warmer than normal autumns, with France seeing days of 30C+.
The enormous extension of these anomalies of +8/10ºC above normal demonstrates just how warm the Mediterranean has been recently, with one wave after another, tweeted the weather network Meteoiberia.
🌡️Esto es tremendo | #Europa va a ser afectada por un nuevo “arreón” excepcionalmente cálido los próximos días. Valores de +30ºC en #Francia y hasta 33ºC en el sur de #España a las puertas de NOVIEMBRE. Anomalías completamente fuera de lugar y demasiado extensas para las fechas. pic.twitter.com/IVKTQBZun5
— Meteoiberia.ES (@MeteoIberiaEs) October 24, 2022