Belgium, Europe– The temperatures are forecast to hit 30°C after a sunny and warm weekend.
The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium predicts a cloudy start to this week with the chance of localized thunderstorms, especially in the east of the nation.
On Monday, in the evening, it will be mostly dry with a low of 19℃ as well as a high of 25℃. There were more clouds on Tuesday and chances of mild temperatures, but there was a 28-30℃ high on Wednesday.
Moreover, Thursday and Friday are looking balmy, with higher chances of thunderstorms before the weather cools slightly for the weekend.
The long dry period is the result of a slow-moving area of high pressure – a ‘standstill’ that is largely caused by the slowing of the gulf stream.
Along with this, the professor of climate science at the VUB, Wim Thiery, mentioned in the statement, “The good weather of the past few weeks is the result of a ‘blockage,’ which occurs when a high-pressure area is, as it were, in stuck.”
“The high-pressure area remains in place, with the result that it doesn’t rain for weeks on end. The last word has not yet been said on this, but there are more studies indicating that climate change increases the chance of such a blockage.”
Meanwhile, when record temperatures (of up to about 50 degrees Celsius) were recorded in Canada and the United States of America in the last year, a high-pressure area was also trapped. Evidence suggests that such as extreme heatwave would have been virtually impossible without climate change.
In the last year’s wet summer in Western Europe, with the floods in Wallonia were the other side of the same coin, a large area of rain stayed over Belgium as well as parts of the Netherlands and Germany.
Furthermore, researchers were able to show afterwards that the probability of such intense rain has clearly increased due to the effects of climate change.
