A blanket of hot air stretching from the Mediterranean to the North Sea is bringing much of Western Europe its first heat wave of the summer, with temperatures Friday exceeding 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) from London to Paris.
Meteorologists say the unusually early heat wave is a sign of what’s to come as global warming continues, moving up in the calendar the temperatures that Europe would previously have seen only in July and August.
“In some parts of Spain and France, temperatures are more than 10 degrees higher — that’s huge — than the average for this time of year,” Clare Nullis, a spokesperson for the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, said.
In France, some 18 million people woke to heat wave alerts affecting about a third of the country Friday. Forest fire warnings were issued from the Pyrenees in the south to the Paris region.
That report of 53 ˚C refers to a land surface temperature rather than an air temperature recorded in a Stephenson box. I’m not trying to minimize this, but we need to be careful to make sure that we compare like with like when discussing this stuff.