A hot apocalypse in Prague and Europe from the perspective of satellites
The Old Continent is one of the regions that is warming faster than most other regions of the planet. Its inhabitants have experienced numerous heat waves in recent years, but also in recent days. Both fires and excess deaths result.
The heat is not avoided in the Czech Republic either, where the temperature approaches 37 degrees Celsius in the middle.
Fire pit in Prague
The European Space Agency ESA shared on Twitter data from the ECOSTRESS instruments – the thermal radiometer of the American agency NASA, which is mounted on the ISS space station. the device recorded a temperature map in Prague on Monday, July 18. The places with the biggest fires are visible on it.
https://twitter.com/ESA_EO/status/1547494859560427521
Prague is a metropolis that is noticeably warming up. This is confirmed by a study published this year in a professional journal Urban climatewhich was prepared by experts from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of the Environment of the University of Agriculture.
The researchers compared the average daily temperature measured in Prague-Ruzyn in the warm half-year (May–September) in individual decades from the eighties of the last century (1982–1989) to the first decade of this century (2010–2019) and their impact on mortality in Prague.
They found that the risk of death due to heat in Prague in the past decade (2010 to 2019) was almost twice as high as in the three previous decades. The record number of heat-related deaths was recorded in 2015. At that time, there were more than 250 deaths in Prague, which was more than five percent of all deaths between May and September.
“The frequency and intensity of heat waves in the past decade was unprecedented,” he quotes website of the Academy of Sciences Aleš Urbana, head of the scientific team. “While the average summer temperature in the eighties reached 15.3 degrees Celsius, between 2010 and 2019 it was 16.9 degrees and there was also a significant increase in days with an average daily temperature higher than 20 degrees,” the scientist leads.
Forty humbled
In the inflow of hot air from Africa, which lives at lower pressure in the west of Portugal, temperatures in some areas of Europe have been climbing to forty for a week now, and in some places they even significantly exceed it. In the Portuguese city of Pinhão, for example, they measured 47 degrees on Thursday, July 14.
Heat and drought are accompanied by numerous wildfires. ESA’s Sentinel 2 satellite captured a fire in the mountains at the southern end of the province of Salamanca in Castile and the smoke spreading from it.
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Visitors to the island of Crete may also encounter fires. The birth of one of them was recorded by the same satellite on Sunday near the village of Melambes.
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However, the heat also hit other places in the northern hemisphere. The following map shows the surface air temperature in its eastern part on July 13, 2022. It was created by the NASA Goddard Space Center’s modeling system.
NORTHERN HEMISPHERE
“While there is an ‘atmospheric wave’ pattern describing the alternation of warm (redder) and cool (bluer) values in different locations, the large area of extreme heat you see on the map is a clear indicator that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are causing extreme weather , which affect our living conditions,” says Steven Pawson of the Goddard Center on the site Earth Observatory.