VIDEO – Record mildness in France: a winter heatwave?

In recent days, near Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales), the thermometer has displayed 20 degrees during the day and 16 degrees at night. In a campsite, a couple of vacationers had never seen this. “Last year at the same time, in Sète (Hérault), we had heating. This year, we sleep without heating, without anything”, says the husband in the TF1 20H report above. “We are in a T-shirt, it’s really very nice”, adds his wife.

All over France, records are broken. As of Thursday morning, the average temperature in the country was 11 degrees, eight degrees above seasonal norms. In Narbonne (Aude), it had not been so hot in December since 1997. So the Christmas market takes on the appearance of a summer funfair. “You can go out with the children without any problem. You don’t need to cover yourself up, or put on a scarf or a hat”, testifies a woman. “It’s not normal, it’s still worrying, but hey, we’re trying to take advantage”, agrees another.

These temperatures are abnormal for the period, day and night. “If we postpone it in the middle of summer, it’s called a heatwave“Jean-Yves Choplin, forecaster at Météo-France, appeared on TF1 on Tuesday. For his colleague Christelle Robert, interviewed in the video at the top of this article, this is explained by a set of phenomena brought together by chance at the same time. “We have a very soft and humid air mass that has spread over the country. So it is both the combination of this soft and humid air mass and then a fairly cloudy sky during the night that avoided terrestrial cooling “, she explains.

Consequently, it was 13 degrees in Lille (North) on the night of Wednesday to Thursday, 13.3 in Metz (Moselle) or even 12.5 in Dijon (Côte-d’Or). In the latter city, many residents were surprised. “We had put on the down jacket as usual and we were too hot. We put it under our arms so much we felt the exceptional heat in Dijon”, says one of them.

And on the terrace, many to enjoy it. “We went out to a terrace bar, it was really hot. We didn’t want to keep our coats and hats on even at 10pm”, adds another. The episode is drawing to a close. Temperatures will drop from January 2 to approach seasonal norms.