April with summer airs: it is already the warmest on record

BarcelonaThe combination of a mass of warm air and the persistence of the anticyclone have caused us to leave behind an exceptionally warm April across the country, the warmest ever recorded at 104 out of the 122 stations of the Meteocat Automatic Meteorological Station Network, which have over 20 years of data. The head of the Climatology area of Meteocat, Marc Prohom, highlights that this atmospheric pattern has driven warm air from North Africa towards Catalonia, causing such high temperatures in the middle of spring.

These extremely high thermal values have been particularly elevated in the interior of the country, as in areas close to the coast, the effect of the sea breeze —with still relatively low sea temperatures— has helped keep the mercury from rising as much. It is a situation we see clearly in Baix Llobregat, highlights Prohom, where at the Prat station, located in the delta, an anomaly of +0.8 °C was recorded compared to the climatic average for April, while at the Garraf Natural Park - el Rascler station, located in the mountain range, this anomaly was +4.1 °C, five times higher.

It is a situation that has also occurred in the high Pyrenean mountains, where, after a winter and an early April with a snow depth much higher than usual, the high temperatures and the formation of showers and thunderstorms have accelerated the snowmelt, which has been more sudden than in previous years. A clear example can be found in Núria (1,971 m), where on April 17th the snow on the ground finished melting, while in Certascan (2,398 m) it went from 2.3 meters of snow on the ground on April 3rd to the current meter; a situation that has caused an increase in the flow of rivers originating in the Pyrenean mountain range. A maximum depth of 89 centimeters had been reached there.

Record also at the Fabra Observatory

The long tradition of meteorological observations in our country allows us to compare current data with records from more than a century ago, as is the case at the Fabra Observatory in Barcelona or the Ebre Observatory, located in Roquetes (Baix Ebre). In this second case, this April ranks second among the warmest (18.5 °C), only three tenths behind 2023.

The case of the observatory in the Catalan capital —with data since 1914— is noteworthy, where the average of 17.4 °C exceeds the previous record of 2023 by 1.3 °C, and by almost 4 °C the climatic average for the month of April in the period 1991-2020. In fact, if this average temperature had been recorded in May, it would also have been a few tenths higher than normal. In this same location, just two weeks ago, the highest minimum temperature in April since records began had already been recorded.

Furthermore, April has ended with another record: five days with a maximum temperature above 25 °C. To get an idea of how unusual this was, we only need to look at data from a few decades ago: between 1914 and 1994, temperatures above 25 °C in an April month were only exceeded on five days. That is to say, in a single month of April, a temperature value that had been reached five times in eighty years during the last century has been achieved five times. This is further proof of the trend towards a warmer planet with more extreme climate events.