UDINE. In the days when the UN launches yet another desperate climate alarm, Italy is in the grip of the African anticyclone ‘Lucifer’. The next few days – say the weather forecasters – will be the hottest of the summer: temperatures will continue to rise day after day, first in the South, then also in the North. The team of the ilMeteo.it site informs that until Wednesday 11 August our cities will be the hottest.
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Cities with red stamps
Therefore, the emergency rises and the cities marked with the red dot of the Ministry of Health which indicates the maximum level of health risk are increasing day by day: four today, 8 tomorrow and 10 Thursday. The 10 urban centers with the red stamp on Thursday are Bari, Bologna, Campobasso, Frosinone, Latina, Palermo, Perugia, Rieti, Rome and Trieste (all, except Bologna and Trieste, also red tomorrow). Three days in a row with the red sticker, starting today, for Bari, Campobasso, Rieti and Rome. As for the orange stamps (risk only for the most fragile), there are 9 today and tomorrow, 8 on Friday.
Forecasts
The intense heat will continue throughout the week and will most likely also last during the weekend of August 15th. In the North, temperatures will tend to increase with intense heat from Wednesday 11 August: in this area it could easily exceed 35 degrees. In the South and on the Islands from Thursday temperatures will tend to drop slightly, in a context of very intense heat. The heat will continue also in the weekend of August: Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 August the weather should be stable and sunny with only some local afternoon thunderstorms in the Alps. The climate will remain hot with values widely above the seasonal averages.
THE FORECASTS OF THE OSMER
This climate is becoming the norm.
Italy remains occupied for weeks by the African anticyclone. In addition, the air of the desert is charged with humidity when crossing the Mediterranean. And, according to experts, for this, in addition to high temperatures, we suffer from the heat. What awaits us in the week of August 15th, explains Lieutenant Colonel Guido Guidi, meteorologist of the Air Force, “is the fourth heat wave of the summer”. The definition of a heat wave is «a period of at least 5 days in which the maximum exceeds 35 degrees. Until now they had covered the South. The current one will reach the Po Valley and will accompany us until mid-August, but perhaps beyond. The anomaly may be 7 degrees above the average. The cities of the hinterland will easily exceed 40 degrees, even reaching 43-44. At the center it will reach 38-40, in the Po Valley at 36-38 ».
For the Air Force, the maximum temperatures will reach 44 degrees, for other forecasting sites they will even reach 48 degrees. The only consolation: “From Wednesday a slight mistral will take the place of the winds from the south, lowering the humidity”
But what happens at the meteorological level?
When air masses of such different temperatures come into contact, turbulence occurs. And floods. And huge hailstones, as the farmers of the North know well. Europe has now become the ring in which masses of air increasingly charged with energy collide. “When we hear about a degree of global warming, we imagine our room slightly warmer. But can we think how much energy it takes to heat the entire planet’s atmosphere by one degree? It is as if we have subjected the Earth to a gigantic doping effect ». «For the first time we noticed it in 2003, with a particularly intense heat wave over the whole of Europe» recall the meteorologists.
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Victims of the heat
In the first of the many torrid summers that would follow, 70,000 victims were counted due to the heat. Since 2003 the anomalies have become even more frequent and the CNR, which through the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences monitors temperatures in Italy, speaks for last June (the last month measured) of a deviation from the 1981 average. -2010 by 2.18 degrees, the fourth result in a ranking led precisely since 2003. The same monitoring service, at European level, is carried out by the Copernicus satellite program. The latest bulletin records July 2021 as the third hottest ever, on a par with 2020. Only recent years are on the podium: 2019 followed by 2016.
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