For days there has been talk of a weakening of Charon , the anticyclone which for a couple of weeks has been recording high temperatures throughout Italy and in particular in Sardinia. But those hoping for a truce will be disappointed because meteorologists have announced the arrival of a "Charon bis" , a new African blaze that will reach peaks of 48°C in Sardinia , over 45 in Puglia.
An extreme heat which, explains Mattia Gussoni of iLMeteo.it, will also warm the seas: the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change in fact predicts a water temperature of 32°C for the end of July, hotter even than that of the Caribbean Sea . It is, explains the expert, the «very serious problem of the Mhw, the Marine Heat Waves, which are increasingly frequent with boiling sea water. We have noticed this by bathing in Italy for years now, but this 2023 seems even worse than 2022 ».
On the mainland instead, in addition to the heat, Gussoni adds, «we are also experiencing the disaster of extreme events caused by global warming : never as in this month have we understood that, after an African anticyclone phase at 40-48°C, storms, destructive hail and floods always arrive on time. Extreme phenomena are closely connected to heat and humidity: the warmer an air mass is, the greater the humidity it contains, humidity which forms raindrops, hailstones and thunderstorms. Furthermore, the hotter the air, the lighter it is: in this way the vapor rises up to 10 km in height inside the cumulonimbus clouds, freezes and causes hailstones as large as 10 cm, as happened in the last few days in the Po Valley».
In short, the climate in Italy is increasingly tropical . Charon bis will bring with him a hot week.
Finally, as regards today's maximum temperatures , at 5 pm the highest was that recorded in Monti , where the column of the Arpa station touched 40.5°C.
The alert for the next few days has already been signaled by the Civil Protection of the Region until at least midnight on Monday.
(Unioneonline/ss)