On the last day of 2022, Europe was gripped by an unprecedented heat wave, which brought April temperatures in many regions, setting new records for the first month of the year. On January 1, it was +20 degrees in Switzerland, +16 in Belarus, +19 degrees in Poland. Where did the heat come from and what is the temperature difference from normal for the period?

Climatologists say the event was absolutely exceptional, given that it covered the whole of Europe, brought absolute records for three days and nights at thousands of weather stations and brought 15 C in places in the north where they were NOT, with normal plus temperatures.

In addition, the nights were also warm in many places, an example is Romania, where the minimum temperature on the morning of January 2 was +14 degrees at the Bisoca weather station, located at an altitude of 830 meters above sea level in the county of Buzeu. In Bisoka, the night minimums of the first month of the year average -3 C.

One of the highest temperatures recorded these days was +25.1 C in Bilbao, northern Spain, while in Romania it was +21.3 C in Pâtârlagele on January 2 and +20.7 C in Curtia de Arges the next day.

In the Swiss city of Delemont at an altitude of 439 m above sea level, it was +20 degrees on the first day of the year, and in the French Alps, many resorts did not start the cable car, because there was no snow, it was raining heavily and there were no conditions for creating artificial snow.

Also in France on January 1 there was +24.9 C in Trois-Villes, +24 C in Dax and absolute January records (+18.6 C) at the weather stations in Besançon and Chateaux, where there are more than 140 meteorological measurements. years

At least seven countries broke national heat records in January, and one small town in Poland was over 19 degrees Celsius at 4am, 20 degrees above normal. In Warsaw, it was +19 degrees, which is 4 degrees higher than the previous record. In the most famous Polish mountain resort, Zakopane, it was +17 degrees at an altitude of 850 m.

In the town of Javornik in the Czech Republic it was +19.6°C, and in the Netherlands in Eindhoven, famous for the football team PSV and the company Philips, it was +16.9°C.

One of the surprising national records was set in Belarus: +16.4°C in Vysokye, beating the previous record by +4.5°C, while overall the new record exceeds the old one by less than 0.5°C.

It was almost 15 degrees in Lithuania, +13 degrees in Denmark, and +11 degrees in Lithuania. Usually, at the beginning of the year, the temperature was below zero everywhere.

It was also extremely hot in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad: +14 C, but also in Ukraine (+20 in Ivano-Frankivsk, +18 C in Chernivtsi). In the Republic of Moldova, it was +16 degrees in the cities of Cornesti and Verenkeu.

Sources: Washington Post, BBC, data from climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, weatheronline.co.uk platform