Intense Heatwave Grips France as Temperatures Soar Above 40°C

The heatwave will settle in France in the coming days. From the Midi to the Rhône valley, particularly intense heat is expected in 28 departments. "This weekend, the heat will intensify, especially in the southern half of the country. It is expected to be persistent and intense with values sometimes exceeding 40°C in the southeast from Sunday. It should hold at least until the middle of next week. The heatwave vigilance will therefore still have to evolve," Météo France announced, specifying that at "the scale of France, this new episode is expected to be one of the latest with such a level of intensity for a summer". Météo France points out that this is a rather rare phenomenon, after August 15th. There have been 6 since 1947, all in the 21st century, it is specified.

"We are clearly in a heatwave period," says Gabriel Chantrel, a forecaster at Météo-France, at the Interregional Center-East in Lyon-Bron. At the origin of this heat wave, a dome of heat that has been installed for several weeks over the Mediterranean basin and which is bringing subtropical air from the Sahara in Morocco towards France. On Sunday, the General Directorate of Meteorology (DGM) indicated that the Agadir weather station, in the south of the kingdom, recorded on August 11 a maximum temperature of 50.4°C, considered as the new national record. The previous record dated back to July 13 (49.9°C) in Smara, a city in the Sahara.

The heat dome "is a situation we encounter when we have a very powerful anticyclone, we have high pressures at the surface but also at altitude" thus forming a kind of bell, explains Pascal Mormal, a meteorologist at the IRM, on the Première, estimating that "temperatures will reach 40°C in the shade for several days". Due to these pressures "the air will compress, which will warm the atmospheric mass in this bell and maintain a kind of vicious circle that will be very difficult to destabilize," he added.