News Weather
Since March, the Sahel region in Africa has suffered a lasting and widespread heat wave with numerous monthly records such as in Mali and Chad. Could this lasting heat wave have consequences on France?
A heat wave that has lasted for 2 months
The hot season in the Sahel is particularly intense this year. Several episodes of heatwaves have followed one another since March in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad with temperatures exceeding 45°C. If the hottest months of the year are statistically during this period, the values have reached records.
On April 3, 48.5°C was reached in western Mali, a continental record for the month of April.
Since then, heat and drought continue to persist in this region, with temperatures still exceeding 43°C in Chad this week.
What link with France?
This heat wave in the Sahel is not trivial, it shows that heat reserves are now very widespread over the northern half of the African continent, even into the Algerian desert. With l’meteorological summer approaching, these reserves could approach the Mediterranean basin by moving up to southern Europe if the synoptic conditions are favorable.
The synoptic designates the global meteorological context which controls the air masses. Currently, the cold drops present on the Atlantic Ocean direct a flow from west to southwest towards our country, preventing us from the installation of heat. But if this configuration were to change in the coming weeks, with the rise towards the north of subtropical anticyclones and the establishment of a depression off the coast of Portugal and Morocco, acting like a “heat pump”, the flow could come up from the south. If this were to be the case, the meteorological context in France could then radically change with the onset of a heat wave, which actually happened in June of last year, and even as early as the month of April with an early heatwave in Spain.
In the past, in France, similar configurations have been observed in the heart of summer, causing extreme heat waves as in 2019 or in 2022.
With the climate changewe should expect increasingly long and hot summers in the coming years, due to the accumulation of these vast reserves of burning air, rising towards Western Europe under the influence of these more extensive subtropical anticyclones.