Met. Office predicts a “hotter than normal” summer

SUMMER this year in the Balearics is going to be hotter than normal, in stark contrast to the unusually cold spring weather we have left behind, Agusti Jansa, regional Met. Office Chief said yesterday.

Today and tomorrow, the last weekend in June, said Jansa, temperatures will be high but not excessively so. It will reach 30 degrees Centigrade in the centre of Majorca while the coastal areas will be slightly cooler at between 28 and 29 degrees. Ibiza and Formentera will be cooler still with maximum temperatures wavering between 26 and 27 degrees.

At night time and during the early hours of the morning, temperatures will plunge significantly to minimums of 13 and 14 degrees in the interior and 16 or 17 degrees around the coastal areas. Jansa said that it is normal for day-time temperatures to reach 30 degrees in the centre of the island at the beginning of July.

Last Sunday, said Jansa, had been “particularly cold” with an average regional temperature of just 21 degrees. But the thermometer had crept up over the course of the week until 29 degrees Centigrade was recorded in Sa Pobla.

The weather chief pointed out that we are still experiencing temperatures which are one or two degrees below average. He insisted on the significance of the difference although to the layman, it might not seem much. He said that last spring was between half a degree and one degree colder than normal, and the margin was really noticed, he claimed. Jansa gave assurances however that this latest chill is going to give way to a “particularly hot” summer, “much warmer” than usual, he said. Despite this, said Jansa, the water reserves in the Balearics are much higher than normal. On Majorca, he said, “there's an extraordinary” excess of 58 percent. He gave a reminder of the torrential rainfall at the beginning of May this year which broke the banks of flood channels and flooded homes and farmland.

However, it will be “much dryer than usual” this summer, said Jansa. “We're not going to get the same amount of rainfall at the end of August and beginning of September as we have in previous years,” he claimed.