Heat waves in Europe, America, Asia, temperature records in Italy and France

ROME (Reuters) – Temperature records were broken in Italy and France on Tuesday as a heatwave swept across Europe, the United States and parts of Asia, prompting health officials to fear a rising death toll.

The temperature in Rome reached 41.8 °C in June 2022, one degree above the previous record (40.7 °C).

In France, records have also been recorded in the Pyrenees, 40°6 in Verdun (Aries) or 40°4 in Serralongue (Pyrénées-Orientales), 41°8 in Puget-Theniers in the Alpes-Maritimes and Corsica Are. According to Meteo France.

Seven departments (two in Corsica, Alpes-Maritimes, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Var, Vaucluse, Pyrénées-Orientales) have been placed under heat wave orange alert. Three others will also take place on Wednesday (Bouches-du-Rhône, Gard and Hérault).

In Italy, the health ministry on Tuesday issued a red weather alert for 20 of the country’s 27 major cities – indicating a potential danger to the health of anyone exposed to the heat. The number is expected to rise to 23 on Wednesday. Meteorological services have predicted temperatures above 47°, especially in Sardinia.

In Spain, the regions of Catalonia and Aragon in the northeast, as well as the Mediterranean island of Majorca, were on alert for temperatures between 42 and 44 °C, with some cities breaking records including Toledo where temperatures reached 42.9 °C. Tuesday, unheard of for the month of July.

National meteorological agency AEMET said the night was warm and the temperature did not drop below 25 degrees Celsius at some places.

Nineteen days in a row at 43° in Phoenix

In Greece, authorities asked residents near wildfires in Dervenokoria, north of Athens, to close doors and windows as smoke from the flames was carried by strong winds.

In the United States, Phoenix, Arizona was to experience temperatures over 110°F (about 43.3°C) for the nineteenth consecutive day this Tuesday, an unprecedented series.

These extreme weather conditions promote wildfires, such as in Greece or Switzerland, but are also prone to storm surges, such as in Vermont in the northeastern United States, where they can exacerbate soils already submerged by recent torrential rains. but may fall and cause further flooding.

China, where temperatures in the Xinjiang region exceeded 52 degrees on Sunday, saw the arrival of the year’s first Typhoon Talim on the night of Monday to Tuesday, which hit the southern province of Canton before turning into a tropical storm. In the early hours of Tuesday, it struck for the second time and moved to the Guangxi region.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) expects a heat wave to intensify in the Northern Hemisphere over the next few days and warned of health risks.

While scientists have been warning for decades about the potential consequences of climate change, heat waves in Europe are estimated to have killed more than 61,000 people in Europe last year.

(Reporting by Angelo Amante, Emma Farge, Giselda Vagnoni, Crispian Balmer, Angelique Coutantou, Emma Pinedo, Gabrielle Tetreault-Farber; French version edited by Victor Goury-Lafont and Bertrand Boussy, Kate Enstringer and Jean Terzien)