PARIS: Spain, France and other western European nations on Saturday sweltered under a blistering June heatwave that has sparked forest fires and concerns that such early summer blasts of hot weather will now become the norm.
The weather on Saturday was the peak of a June heatwave that is in line with scientists’ predictions that such phenomena will now strike earlier in the year thanks to global warming.
The French southwestern town of Biarritz, one of the country’s most sought-after seaside resorts, saw its highest all time temperature on Saturday of 41 degrees, state forecaster Meteo France said.
Queues of hundreds of people and traffic jams formed outside aquatic leisure parks in France, with people seeing water as the only refuge from the devastating heat.
With the River Seine off limits to bathing, scorched Parisians took refuge in the city’s fountains.
Temperatures in France could reach as high as 42 degrees C in some areas on Saturday, Meteo France said, adding that June records had already been beaten in 11 areas on Friday.
“This is the earliest heatwave ever recorded in France” since 1947, said Matthieu Sorel, a climatologist at Meteo France. With “many monthly or even all-time temperature records likely to be beaten in several regions’’, he called the weather a “marker of climate change”.