Spain

It seems to me that even allowing for the rise in temperature due to global warming, there’s been an additional surge in temperatures across Iberia and northwest Africa in recent years. That’s particularly noticeable in summer, but can also be seen in the rest of the year too. The latest plume event is ongoing at the moment (27 April 2023), but has had a limited northward extent so far. I decided to look back at the last 40 years of daily maximum temperatures at Cordoba to see what I could find by plotting a scatter graph and adding a trend line.

As you can see I’m using the 1981-2010 LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO., which is courtesy of Wikipedia, and not the latest, but the linear trend at Cordoba does show a warming trend of well over a degree a decade. I can’t say if these results are just local to Cordoba, or if they’re occurring more widely across the rest of Iberia and Northwest Africa, but it does go a long way to explain the media hype about the present heatwave. I’m sure some more detailed research would find that there’s been an increase in Spanish plumes events in all seasons of the year, and that their effects aren’t just limited to the Iberian peninsula.