Sicily may have recorded Europe’s highest-ever temperature yesterday, while hot air from the Sahara creates a "heat dome" over parts of the Mediterranean.
A weather station in Syracuse, on the southeast coast of the island of Sicily, recorded 48.77C degrees on Wednesday. If verified by the World Meteorological Organisation, the temperature would establish a new European heat record.
The previous verified European record of 118.4C was established in Greece on July 10, 1977.
According to reports from the Washington Post, the sweltering heats have been caused by a “heat dome” sitting over the region.
As atmospheric pressure above an area builds up, a sinking column of air is created, which compresses, heats up and often dries out.
The sinking air then acts as a cap, or heat dome, over the area, trapping the heat over the landscape, pushing out cooler air currents and squeezing clouds away.
Such a high pressure system (also known as an anticyclone) strengthened over southern Europe, the Mediterranean and northern Africa earlier this week. The weather system has been dubbed ‘Lucifer’, due to the extreme heat it has created.
The dome is expected to remain sitting over southern Europe and northern Africa into early next week. Forecasters expected it to peak in intensity on Thursday and Friday, before gradually easing.
While Lucifer sweeps across the nation, Syracuse’s mayor, Francesco Italia, has told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica the heatwave was worrying.
“We are devastated by the fires and our ecosystem - one of the richest and most precious in Europe - is at risk,” he said.
“We are in full emergency.”
Italy’s health ministry has issued “red” alerts for extreme heat for several regions as large parts of the Mediterranea region continue to battle the intense weather.
Meteorologist Duncan Scott told The Independent that further records will follow this shocking new high
He said: “A dangerous heatwave spanning much of North Africa and into Southern Europe is unfolding right now. The focus of heat will shift west and north slightly in the coming days. More records are inevitable.”
Sicily has been heavily hit by fires in recent days, causing huge damage to the landscape on the Italian island of Sardinia.
Fires ravaged southern Italy on Wednesday, burning thousands of acres of land and killing a 76-year-old man when his house collapsed due to the flames, Ansa news agency reported.
Firefighters said on Twitter they had carried out more than 3,000 operations in Sicily and Calabria in the last 12 hours, employing seven planes to try to douse the flames from above.
"We must immediately respond to this emergency, providing economic relief to those who have lost everything," said Agriculture Minister Stefano Patuanelli.
News of the extreme heat comes after a damning UN report published on Monday warned of a humanity-threatening rise in temperatures - following "unequivocal" evidence human activity is warming the planet.
The paper, produced by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is the starkest warning yet about the speed and scale of warming - caused by human activity which is damaging the world at an alarming rate.
Experts said the report, which is hoped will trigger a "turning point" in the run-up to the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in November, paints a "devastating" picture.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the report as a "code red for humanity".
"The alarm bells are deafening," he said in a statement. "This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet."
Produced by 200 scientists from 60 countries, the report is the first comprehensive assessment of the physical science of climate change since 2013.
Drawing on 14,000 scientific studies, the report gives the most “devastating” picture yet of the impacts humans are having through activities like burning fossil fuels – and the future we face if we fail to rapidly tackle the crisis.
Its summary reads: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”
Previous IPCC reports only said it was “extremely likely” that industrial activity was to blame, but co-author Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Oxford University, said: “There is no uncertainty language in this sentence, because there is no uncertainty that global warming is caused by human activity and burning of fossil fuels.”
The extreme heats and killer fires have erupted across several parts of Europe in recent weeks.
Italy’s fire service was kept busy last week with blazes in the southern town of Gravina in Puglia and San Giacomo degli Schiavoni, further to the north.
Warnings were issued in southern France, with forecasters warning of a “very severe risk” of fires due to the combination of dry and windy weather.
Spain’s weather service yesterday recorded a temperature of 46.66C in the Costa Del Sol, and predicted mercury levels could also surpass 111F in other areas.
In Greece, many villages on the Peloponnese peninsula were evacuated today as exhausted firefighters battled wildfires for a ninth consecutive day.
Authorities have warned the public to avoid unnecessary journeys as temperatures rose to 45C, or 113F, in some parts.
At the other end of the Mediterranean, fires also tore through forested areas of northern Algeria on Wednesday, killing at least 65 people, state television reported.
