Portugal experienced the “warmest” November ever recorded, with an average temperature of 15.14 degrees Celsius, the National Meteorological Institute (IMPA) announced on Thursday
The month “November was the warmest on record” since IPMA began collecting data in 1931, a spokesman for the Portuguese institute told AFP.
The temperature exceeded by “2.69 degrees” this month’s average from 1981-2010, added IMPA, which is to publish its bulletin for the month of November, with all the complete data, in the following days.
In Spain, the national meteorological agency AEMET also announced on Monday that the “warmest” month of November was recorded, with an average temperature of 12.4 degrees Celsius, equivalent to 0.5 degrees Celsius more than the previous record, which dates back to 1983.
Like neighboring Spain, Portugal experienced in 2023 the second warmest year recorded in this country since 1931, with an average temperature of 16.5 degrees Celsius, slightly below the 16.6 degrees Celsius recorded the previous year.
Aggravated by climate change, forest fires destroyed almost 140,000 hectares of vegetation in Portugal this year, i.e. the worst balance since 2017, when the scorched surface exceeded 530,000 hectares.
2023 was the hottest year on record for the planet, flirting for the first time throughout the year with the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius set by the Paris Agreement, the astronomical observatory Copernicus announced in its latest annual report published in January.
With an average temperature of 14.98 degrees Celsius, last year was 1.48 degrees Celsius warmer than the climate of the pre-industrial era (1850-1900). The new record exceeds by a wide margin (0.17 degrees Celsius) the previous one, quite recently, from 2016.
