The New Year brought warm winter weather to parts of Europe, and specialized websites of various countries report daily new temperature records in Switzerland, Poland, and Hungary.
Budapest registered a record warm weather for Christmas, and on January 1 the temperature rose to 18.9°C. In France, where the night of December 30-31 was the warmest on record, temperatures soared to almost 25C in the south-west on New Year’s Day, while Europe’s normally bustling ski resorts were empty due to a lack of snow.
Germany’s meteorological service, which recorded temperatures above 20°C, said the country had not seen such a warm winter since records began in 1881. In the Czech Republic, trees are blooming in private gardens, and the Swiss Office of Meteorology and Climatology has warned allergy sufferers about the pollen that has already started to spread.
At Bilbao Airport in the Basque Country, Spain, the temperature reached 25.1°C. People basked in the sun by sitting near the Guggenheim Museum or walking along the Nervion River.
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“This is supposed to be good weather for cycling, but we know that the planet is literally on fire. So we enjoy it, but at the same time we are afraid,” says French tourist Joana Host.
Three days of records
The new year 2023 also began with temperature records in the capital of Ukraine. According to the weather station of the Borys Sreznevsky Central Geophysical Observatory, on January 1 in Kyiv, for the first time in 143 years of observation, the average daily air temperature was 10.3°C, and the maximum for the day reached 13.2°C. The climatic norm was exceeded by 13.8 ° C, which corresponds to the weather norms in mid-April.
Municipal utility workers shared on social networks photos of cherry blossoms, which at this time blossomed in one of the Kyiv parks.
In the following two days, winter in Kyiv continued to maintain record temperature indicators: on January 2, the maximum temperature in the capital rose to 13.2°C, and on the 3rd it dropped slightly to 10.7°C. The previous absolute maximum temperature in January was recorded on January 11, 1991.
Causes and consequences
January’s warm weather predictably fits into a long-term trend of rising temperatures due to human-induced climate change.
It also follows another year of extreme weather events that scientists believe are directly linked to global warming, including deadly heatwaves in Europe and India and floods in Pakistan.
The rise in temperature also promotes earlier flowering of plants and premature emergence of animals from hibernation, which can lead to their death during later sharp cold snaps.
Robert Waterard, director of the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France, said that although temperatures peaked between December 30 and January 2, the warm spell has been going on for two weeks and is not over yet:
“It’s actually a relatively long event.”
Empty slopes
The French national weather agency Meteo France attributed the abnormal temperatures to a mass of warm air moving towards Europe from subtropical zones. This coincided with what would normally be peak ski season: however, all trips are now canceled and the slopes are empty.
- Resorts in the northern Spanish regions of Asturias, León and Cantabria have been closed since Christmas due to a lack of snow.
- At Mount Jahorina in Sarajevo, host of the 1984 Winter Olympics, the holiday period was expected to be one of the busiest weeks of the season as usual. However, the lifts hovered motionless over the slopes covered with grass.
- The ski jumping event in Zakopane, Poland, scheduled for the weekend of January 7-8, has also been cancelled.
“What is happening now is exactly what climate scientists warned us about 10 to 20 years ago, and it is now impossible to prevent,” said Carsten Smid, a climate expert from Germany.
Reduction of gas load
Meanwhile, the unseasonably warm temperatures brought relief to some European governments struggling to secure tight gas supplies and contain soaring prices.
Demand for gas for heating in many countries fell due to the warm period, which contributed to lower prices. The benchmark gas price for the first month was trading at €70.25 per MWh on Wednesday morning, the lowest level since February 2022, just before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Source: Reuters
