PARIS: Austria, France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland announced their hottest Septembers on record on Friday (Sep 29), in a year expected to be the warmest in human history as climate change accelerates.
The unseasonably warm weather in Europe came after the EU climate monitor said earlier this month that global temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere summer were the hottest on record.
French weather authority Meteo-France said the September temperature average in the country will be around 21.5 degrees Celsius, between 3.5 degrees Celsius and 3.6 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 reference period.
Average temperatures in France have been exceeding monthly norms consistently for almost two years.
In neighbouring Germany, weather office DWD said this month was the hottest September since national records started, almost 4 degrees Celsius higher than the 1961-1990 baseline.
Poland’s weather institute announced September temperatures were 3.6 degrees Celsius higher than average and the hottest for the month since records began more than 100 years ago.
National weather bodies in the Alpine nations of Austria and Switzerland also recorded their hottest-ever average September temperatures, a day after a study revealed Swiss glaciers lost 10 per cent of their volume in two years amid extreme warming.
The Spanish and Portuguese national weather institutes warned abnormally warm temperatures were going to hit this weekend, with the mercury topping 35 degrees Celsius in parts of southern Spain on Friday.
Source: CNA
