Add the Gazzetta del Sud as a source
The third African heat wave of the year is arriving in Italy: from Wednesday, in fact, according to iLMeteo.it, up to 39 degrees are expected in the Po Valley and by the weekend 40 degrees in Oristano and 39 also in Puglia and Tuscany. And the WHO warns: “other lethal weeks could await Europe.”
Third African heat wave: temperatures up to 40 degrees over the weekend
«The next heat wave is already forming in the Atlantic – said the director general of WHO Europe, Hans Henri P. Kluge – Temperatures of up to 43 degrees are expected in Portugal and southern Spain this week. France and Benelux are preparing for another heat wave. Some parts of Central Asia are suffocated by temperatures of 40 degrees.”
Orange and red stickers, the alert is growing in Italian cities
A scenario which in Italy is confirmed by the surge, on Wednesday, in the orange dots in the Ministry of Health’s heat wave bulletin, level 2 (on a scale from 0 to 3) which indicates the risk for the most fragile.
The orange stickers will increase, in fact, from just one today (Florence) to 10 tomorrow (in addition to the Tuscan capital, Ancona, Bologna, Brescia, Milan, Perugia, Pescara, Turin, Venice and Verona).
Looking at the stickers, which affect 27 urban centres, tomorrow will therefore be the hottest day of this new heat wave: on Thursday, in fact, the orange ones will decrease to three (Perugia, Pescara and Turin), while only one red sticker is expected (maximum risk for the entire population), again in Florence. The maximum perceived temperatures, they explain to the Tuscan municipality, are expected to reach up to 36 degrees between today and tomorrow and 37 degrees on Thursday.
In the hottest hours of the day, air temperatures will reach 34 degrees today, 32 degrees on Wednesday and 36 degrees on Thursday, with minimum values between 23 and 24 degrees. The meteorological calculations, the Municipality continues to explain, confirm the strengthening of the African anticyclone over the Mediterranean and its extension to the Centre-North. Tuscany will also be affected by this evolution, with a progressive increase in temperatures.
The WHO warning: «More lethal weeks could await Europe»
But if Italy is dealing with sultry heat, things are certainly no better in Spain which, according to the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet), is dealing with a new intense heat wave: 44 degrees were reached in Aragon, in Catalonia and in the Valencian Community 44 degrees and 42 degrees were exceeded in Seville, Cordoba, Jaen, Huelva, in the southern region of Andalusia, in Badajoz in Extremadura and Ciudad Real, in Castile-La Mancha.
In the next few hours, the 40°C threshold will be exceeded in much of the Iberian peninsula. Extreme heat also in Morocco, under the effect of the Chergui wind, the very hot, dry and dusty wind which, arriving from the Sahara, frequently hits the Atlantic coasts of Morocco. The weather forecast remains hot until Sunday 12 July, with heat peaks of up to 48 degrees.
Increasingly warm Mediterranean: sea beyond the record values of the end of August
The Mediterranean, meanwhile, reached “unprecedented values” for the period of the year at the end of June, with record temperatures up to 2.6 degrees above normal, again according to Aemet. The agency added that Mare Nostrum “even exceeded the normal average for the hottest time of the year, corresponding to the second half of August.”