Lily FRANEY / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
An illustrative photo of the abnormally mild temperatures for the season in Biarritz.
WEATHER – A warm winter. This is a very paradoxical formula, and yet entirely topical. This Thursday, February 15, was marked by exceptional mildness, with no less than 24.2°C recorded in Biarritz. Locally, temperatures rise to 27°C in the south of France, up to 13°C above seasonal norms.
“Heat records for the month were broken in the Basque Country, with 26.7°C in Mendive, 26.3°C in Laruns-Hourat and even 27.2°C in Licq-Arherey,” underlines meteorologist Guillaume Séchet on Twitter. An observation which is accompanied by a map of the situation. And as you can see below, the mildness didn’t just affect the southwest. Paris, for example, recorded its mildest day of the winter with 18.7°C according to the Montsouris station.
The hottest day this winter, and a national record
“This Thursday, February 15 is the hottest day of winter 2024 nationally”, reports for its part the French observatory for storms and tornadoes, Keraunos. With an average recorded temperature of 12.5°C, the temperature this Thursday presents an excess of 6.5°C compared to the normal established from the average of temperatures observed between 1991 and 2020.
Even more exceptional, this observation is not an isolated case over the period. Météo-France has just announced that the first half of February 2024 was the hottest ever recorded in France. Its thermal indicator reached 9.7°C, which exceeds the previous record set in 2002 by 0.2°C.
At the same time, countries further south like Spain and Morocco are also facing particularly high temperatures. This Wednesday, February 14, the thermometer recorded 36.6°C in Tan-Tan, in the south of the country. This is a national record for the month of February. Other records for this period were recorded in the country’s large cities: 36.4°C south of Essaouira, 36°C in Agadir, 35.6°C in Safi… These heat waves cause significant areas of drought, so much so that water restrictions have been put in place locally.
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