It’s hot, really hot right now in Brazil. Much of the country was plunged into a heatwave this weekend, with the highest temperatures of the year in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, right in the middle of spring.
In Rio, residents rushed to the seaside to cool off. The iconic beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana were so packed with people that it was almost impossible to see the sand, sarongs and parasols taking up all the space, right down to the water’s edge.
A thermal sensation of 50.5°C
According to the Alerta Rio system, which depends on the town hall, the maximum temperature recorded on Sunday rose to 42.5°C, in Iraja, a popular neighborhood in the north of the city, with a thermal sensation of 50.5°C . The previous record for 2023 was 41.8°C, in the height of summer, in February.
“Even if I like to enjoy this heat at the beach, I am worried about the planet because I know that it will get worse and worse,” explains Paula Suquet, a 35-year-old teacher, in Ipanema. “Climate change makes us anxious, we think every day about what could happen and many people say that we have already reached the point of no return,” sighs Edmundo Filho, a 39-year-old engineer, who strolls along the promenade.
In Sao Paulo, the largest metropolis in Latin America, the City Hall’s Climate Emergency Management Center (CGE) also reported a record for the year 2023: an average temperature of 36.9°C in the afternoon. Unheard of for a month of November since this body began measuring temperatures nineteen years ago.
Part of Brazil on red alert
In the middle of the week, the National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) warned that this heat wave would affect several regions of Brazil until next Wednesday. This institute has issued a red alert, synonymous with “great danger” for health, in several areas of the southeast and center-west of the country, with temperature forecasts 5°C above seasonal norms.
Brazil has been hit by extreme weather events in recent months, with a historic drought in the Amazon and deadly rains accompanying cyclones in the south of the country. On Wednesday, the European Copernicus Observatory announced that last October had been the hottest on record in the world, the fifth monthly record in a row, with the “almost certainty” that the 2016 annual record would be broken.