Climatologist: Slovakia's summer has been a record-breaker, and not in a good way
It was extremely above average everywhere in Slovakia in terms of temperature, said Milan Lapin, a respected climatologist.
The summer of 2024 in Slovakia has set new heat records, with almost every meteorological station operated by the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute (SHMÚ) recording the warmest weather since meteorological observations began.
“We have recorded five heat waves during the summer – the first two lasted for five days each, the next for 20, 12 and nine days,” respected climatologist Milan Lapin told the TASR newswire, adding that the latest, fifth wave, is estimated to last until September 9.
This summer is rated as extremely above normal, with a deviation of more than 1.7 degrees Celsius from the long-term average. However, at all meteorological stations in Slovakia, the temperature deviation this summer was much more significant. For example, at Hurbanovo in southern Slovakia it was 4.4 degrees Celsius warmer than the long-term average of 1901-2000 and 4.3 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1961-1990 average.
“Thus, the summer of 2024 was extremely above normal everywhere in Slovakia in terms of temperature, and probably also compared to the long-term average from 1991 to 2020,” said Lapin.
At the same time, August this year in Hurbanovo was 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous record August, in 1992. It had a preliminary average temperature of 24.6 degrees Celsius, which means that it was 5.1 degrees Celsius warmer compared to both the long-term averages of 1901-2000 and 1961-1990. The average daily maximum was, based on preliminary data, 31.7 degrees Celsius, which is 5.5 degrees Celsius more than the 1961-1990 average, the climatologist explained.
August 1992 was the hottest previous month in the history of observations in Slovakia so far. Prolonged heat associated with drought led to forest fires in several places. At the same time, however, September 1 brought a significant change, ending the heatwave with a cooling of about 10 degrees Celsius. This year, the heat has continued well into the first third of September.
During the summer of 2024, meteorologists recorded 48 "tropical" days in Hurbanovo: 7 in June, 19 in July and 22 in August. At the same time, according to SHMÚ data, the summer of 2024 brought in Hurbanovo tentatively eight "supertropical" days, with a daytime temperature of 35 degrees Celsius and above, and also 81 summer days with a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius and above. There were also 73 summer nights when the air temperature did not drop below 15 degrees Celsius and, among these, as many as 20 "tropical" nights when it did not drop below 20 degrees Celsius. However, thanks to the persistently high air temperature in recent days, the total number of tropical days – and tropical nights - for the whole of 2024 will be even higher.
“In September 2024, in the first four days, every day somewhere there was a daytime high of 35 degrees Celsius or more, and every night was tropical somewhere,” Lapin told TASR.
He also pointed out that even though about 225 millimetres of rain fell during the summer of 2024 (87 percent of the 1901-1990 average), the fact that it fell almost exclusively as showers and thunderstorms means there were large differences in soil watering even over small distances.
“All 14 months from June 2023 to July 2024 broke global records for heat, as assessed by Copernicus, NASA and NOAA,” said Lapin, who is a professor emeritus at the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science at Comenius University in Bratislava and also works with the SHMÚ. “The year 2024 is also expected to be one of the warmest ever globally since assessments began in 1880.”
Last year was the warmest in the history of measurements, with the average global temperature reaching 14.98 degrees Celsius. This is 1.48 degrees Celsius more than the pre-industrial period, which, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was from 1850 to 1900. The planet’s climate is therefore fast approaching the critical warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
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