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For many people living in the Region of Murcia, summer nights have always meant opening the windows, sitting outside for a while and enjoying a little relief from the heat of the day. But that relief is getting harder to find.
This summer, temperatures have stayed unusually high through the night in much of the Region, with many areas recording minimum temperatures above 20°C for weeks at a time. In some places, the thermometer has barely dipped below 25°C.
While daytime temperatures of 40°C or more are nothing new in Murcia during July and August, meteorologists are increasingly concerned about what happens once the sun goes down.
According to Aemet, minimum temperatures are rising faster than daytime maximums, making increasingly warm nights an important sign of the changing climate. While extreme daytime heat tends to attract more attention, it is the lack of relief after dark that is becoming a particular concern.
The regional capital provides the perfect example. Murcia has spent virtually all of July and August so far with minimum temperatures above 20°C. That means every night has qualified as a tropical night, the meteorological term used when temperatures fail to fall below 20°C.
There have also been 18 nights when the temperature has stayed above 25°C. These are classed as torrid or equatorial nights.
Meteorologists are now using another term for an even more extreme situation, when temperatures remain above 30°C throughout the night. These are known as “hellish nights”, and Aemet says the Region may not be far from recording them.
Some parts of Catalonia and the Canary Islands have already experienced “hellish nights”.
Coastal areas are particularly exposed
For people living along the Costa Cálida, there is another problem. The sea itself is warmer, while humidity makes the heat feel much more oppressive after dark.
San Javier’s weather station at the airport, close to the Mar Menor and the Mediterranean, has been recording increasingly high night-time temperatures.
The town's average maximum temperature last month reached 32.7°C, the highest July average recorded there since records began. There were also 16 days during this summer when temperatures did not fall below 25°C.
A decade ago, the same threshold was reached on just three days across July and August.
The change isn't confined to the coast, either. Even higher areas of the Region are experiencing warmer nights. In Caravaca de la Cruz, temperatures have remained above 20°C on ten nights this summer. In 2016, there were just two such nights across the 62 days of July and August. Summer nights in the higher parts of Murcia used to be cool enough for a blanket, but that is a thing of the past.
And the trend is expected to continue, meaning that for many residents, finding a genuinely cool night's sleep could become one of the biggest challenges of a Murcia summer.
Image: Archive
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