Météo France lifted its heat wave red vigilance this Sunday morning in the south-west of the country, but 52 departments in the center and north-east are still placed on heat wave orange vigilance and/or thunderstorms.
stormy degradation
An “early and intense heat wave is underway over a large eastern part of the country”, notes Météo France which forecasts up to 38 degrees, and locally a little more in the Alsace plain.
Forecasters are also expecting “a strong stormy degradation which will occur at the start of the evening in New Aquitaine and spread towards the Centre, Ile-de-France and then to the Belgian border”.
“These storms will be locally violent, accompanied by hail and strong gusts of wind” specifies Météo France.
Temperature records
The meteorological service noted Saturday “peaks close to 42 ° / 43 ° C” in the south-west, with temperature records “all months combined”, such as in Biarritz (42.9 ° C) or on the basin of Arcachon (in Cap-Ferret) (41.9°C) or in the Landes, in Biscarrosse (41°C, 1968 record equaled).
The symbolic 40°C mark has also been reached elsewhere in the West, such as Deux-Sèvres (Niort), Charente-Maritime (Rochefort), Ille-et-Vilaine (at La Noé-Blanche), Maine-et-Loire (Angers) and Indre-et-Loire (Reignac). However, the mercury did not exceed 37°C in Paris.
This heat wave arrived from the Maghreb via the Iberian Peninsula where Spain is facing major fires, one of which has already ravaged 20,000 hectares of land in the northwest of the country.
For scientists, the multiplication, intensification and lengthening of heat waves, aggravated by greenhouse gas emissions, constitute an unequivocal marker of global warming.