Europe: Warm temperature to start 2023 breaks records – WMO

The unusually warm conditions in Europe that marked the festive season broke records on New Year’s eve and New Year’s Day, the UN World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has confirmed.

And as a growing number of European ski resorts at lower altitudes struggle to provide adequate snow cover for their early-season visitors, the WMO pointed to widely accepted peer-reviewed scientific data from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), indicating that the frequency of cold spells and frost days “will decrease”.

“Strong declines in glaciers, permafrost, snow cover extent, and snow seasonal duration at high latitudes/altitudes are observed and will continue in a warming world,” the IPCC said.

According to the UN agency, New Year temperatures soared above 20 degrees Celsius (C) in many European countries, even in Central Europe.

National and many local temperature records for December and January were also broken in several countries, from southern Spain to eastern and northern parts of Europe, WMO said.

At Spain’s Bilbao airport, a reading of 25.1C on Jan. 1 smashed the previous all-time record established 12 months earlier, by 0.7C.

And in the eastern French city of Besançon, which is usually chilly at this time of year, temperatures hit a new all-time high of 18.6 degrees on New Year’s Day, 1.8C above the previous record, dating back to January 1918.

In the German city of Dresden, the 1961 New Year’s Eve record of 17.7C was left trailing by the 19.4C reading taken on Dec. 31, 2022, just as Poland’s Warsaw residents saw in the new year with temperatures peaking at 18.9C, a staggering 5.1C higher than the previous all-time record for January, from 1993.

Further north, in Denmark’s Lolland island, 2023 started with a new high of 12.6C, overtaking the 12.4C record set in 2005.

WMO attributed the warm spell in Europe to a high-pressure zone over the Mediterranean region which encountered an Atlantic low-pressure system.