Nearly 300 monthly heat records were broken on Sunday October 1, 2023, some of which were more than 100 years old (Poitiers and Bordeaux in particular).
These exceptionally high temperatures for the month of October add to a sad year 2023 marked by heat waves and heatwaves early (June) and late (end of August) in France.
All these records, sometimes broken by several degrees, call into question the legitimacy of reasoning based on temperature normals in a climate system that is disrupted and out of balance.
In an article published in September in The Conversation France, researchers Robin Noyelle, Davide Faranda and Yi Zhang affirm that “the risks of extreme temperatures in Western Europe are underestimated”.
According to them, current forecasting methods do not take into account extreme temperature values which appear statistically aberrant, but which are coherent from a physical point of view in certain meteorological configurations (heat dome in particular).
Rather than simply listing the ephemeral heat records that will fall year after year, it seems essential to anticipate the most improbable heat waves and adapt our cities accordingly.
It is a safe bet that it will now be necessary to predict cooling needs when designing buildings and neighborhoods based on the model of what is currently done in hydrology to size hydraulic structures.
In the same way that we speak of a ten-year, hundred-year or thousand-year flood in hydrology, we will now speak of a ten-year, hundred-year or thousand-year heatwave in bioclimatic conception.
Source: The Conversation
Image: Unsplash, Lucian