Summer has arrived, even slightly later than we used to. But now that there is, the question to ask is always the same: what summer will it be? Hot as those of recent years? Dry or rainy? When will the peaks come? We have tried to answer these questions, as far as it is possible to predict right now, with Andrea Giuliacci of Meteo Expert. The premise is a must: seasonal climate forecasts exist, but they always have a fair margin of error. In the meantime, however, there is one certainty, namely that the month of June that has just ended was not particularly hot: “But not even fresh – specifies Giuliacci -. We haven't processed the data yet, for now we can only say that it will certainly be hotter than in 2019, when the first heat waves hit at the end of the month".
This year, however, it even rained more than usual, especially in the North: “It probably rained more than it should in the North, but the national data is not so exceptional. The fact is that we are used to increasingly hotter and drier Junes, but the averages compare with those of the thirty years 1981-2010, and in the 80s and 90s the summers were less hot than today”. This is why June 2020 was not particularly hot compared to recent years, those from 2000 onwards, but compared to the average starting from 1981 it won't even be below average. "Let's say anyway - confirms the meteorologist - that so far it has been decidedly less hot than in the hottest years, for example 2003, 2012, but also 2017 and 2019. And according to the simulations, it is possible that the entire summer of 2020 remains more or less within the norm, in contrast to the trend of recent years: it is unlikely that it will enter the top 5 of the hottest summers".
What about July and August instead? As far as we can tell, the heat will eventually arrive, and both months will be drier than June (it won't be long in the North…). But at the moment such intense and frequent African waves are not foreseen like those of recent years: “By now these waves – explains Giuliacci – represent normality, but presumably in this summer there shouldn't be too many, especially in the month of July, which historically, on average, is the hottest ever. The heat peak according to the simulations is instead expected in August”. So the summer of Covid, the one that many Italians will be forced to spend at home or even at work, should at least spare us from the unbearable heat.
