2024 becomes Spain's third hottest year of all time
Spain experienced relentless heatwaves in summer and extremely mild temperatures in winter
Spain just keeps getting hotter and hotter, consistently breaking one temperature record after another. The State Meteorological Agency, Aemet, has now confirmed that 2024 was the third warmest year since records began in the early 1960s.
In a social media post shared at the end of December, Aemet revealed that the year closed with an average temperature of 15°C, placing it behind only 2022 (15.4°C) and 2023 (15.2°C) as the hottest years on record.
But the average temperature only tells a part of the story, since many towns in southern Spain reached astonishing highs close to 40°C during the summer’s succession of heatwaves.
In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), Aemet called 2024 “an extremely hot year,” and it’s easy to see why. Across the twelve months, only June and September were classified as cold, while May was considered normal.
Every other month was warmer than usual, with January, August and November breaking records as the hottest in Aemet’s historical series.
The warming trend becomes even more evident when examining daily records. Aemet reported that one in every twelve days in 2024 was the hottest ever recorded for that date. In total, 31 days shattered heat records, while not a single day was the coldest on record.
"In an unchanged climate, one would theoretically have expected five record hot days and five record cold days in 2024," explains Aemet, highlighting how unusual this pattern has become.
Spain isn’t alone in this alarming trend either. The latest climate bulletin from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has revealed that the global average temperature for the 12-month period from October 2023 to September 2024 is the second highest on record, with a staggering 0.74°C increase above the 1991-2020 average.
While 2024 may also be remembered for dramatic weather events like the devastating DANA in Valencia, its relentless heat stands out as a stark indicator of the changing climate.
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