Gloria Holmes
(Paris) The European Space Agency said, on Tuesday, that severe heat waves in Turkey and Cyprus have caused global temperatures to rise above 50 degrees Celsius for the second time in a month.
Turkey is suffering from the worst fires in a decade, destroying forests and farmland as well as populated areas on the coasts of the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas.
“It is clear that the surface temperature in Turkey and Cyprus has again exceeded 50 degrees,” the European Space Agency notes in a statement.
The agency published a map of the area showing several parts in red. The map published on July 2, which combined data collected by the Sentinel-3 satellite, from the European Copernicus program, offered the same characteristics.
European Space Agency
The Sentinel-3 satellite of the Copernicus Program, a network of environmental observation satellites of the International Space Agency.
Weather forecast predicts air temperatures. The data collected by the satellite measures the actual level of energy radiated from the Earth, so it indicates ground-level temperatures.
Excerpt from a press release from the European Space Agency
These temperatures are the ones one would feel if one touched the ground in a particular place, according to NASA explanations.
In recent days, temperatures above 40 degrees (in the air) in several cities in Turkey have caused a record increase in electricity consumption, leading to blackouts on Monday in major cities such as Ankara and Istanbul.
Photo: Yassin Akgül, Agence France-Presse
Fires devour a forest on August 2, 2021 in Mugla, Turkey. Wildfires and thick forests have killed eight people in a week, as a severe heat wave hits Greece, the Balkans and Turkey. This creates the conditions of a powder keg that Greek officials attribute to climate change.
Neighboring Greece has been exposed to the biggest heat wave since 1987. Phenomenon showing the proliferation of heat waves in Europe as a result of global warming.
According to scientists, these heat waves are an unmistakable sign of global warming, and these heat waves are set to multiply, lengthen, and intensify.
Laurence Malcom
