Athens sizzles with hottest June on record
Last month was the hottest June ever experienced by the Greek capital since meteorological records began in 1860, according to the National Observatory of Athens.
NOA readings published on Monday showed that the average temperature over the course of last month came to 29.9 Celsius, with the average daytime high reaching 35.6C (and peaking at 41.2C on June 13). This was 4.4 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1981-2010 average.
Even more alarming is the fact that the nights were 4.8 degrees Celsius hotter, on average, than the last 30-year point of reference, peaking on June 21-22, when the nighttime low came to a not-so-low 29.5 degrees Celsius.
Meanwhile, data collected by the NOA’s station in the downtown Thiseio district, the only one in Greece with consecutive years’ worth of figures since 1860, show that the average temperature in Athens already rose last decade by 1.7 degrees Celsius above the 1860-1900 mean.
The pace, however, has accelerated in recent decades, according to experts.
“The rate of the rise in the temperature in Athens during the summer since the 1970s has been impressive, with the daytime high growing 0.6C every decade. What is even more remarkable is that the nighttime low is rising even faster, at a rate of more than 0.8C per decade,” Dimitra Founta, research director at NOA’s Environmental Research Institute, tells Kathimerini.
What is also telling is that eight of the hottest 10 Junes ever recorded in Athens were during the last 20 years and four of those were in the last decade alone.
“Athens is in the East Mediterranean, which is among the most vulnerable regions to climate change – a hotspot – in terms of thermal risk. Notably, the rate of the rising temperature in the Mediterranean from 1980 onward has been double the global average,” says Founta.
