Springtime in January

Although in full winter season, the weather in Romania is actually spring weather. We've had the warmest Christmas in the past 50 years and the first days of 2023 brought extremely warm temperatures in many regions across the country.

The National Meteorological Agency has also announced a new record high temperature, 22.4 degrees Celsius in Turnu Magurele, southern Romania, when January 18th was the warmest of this month in recorded history. The previous record high belonged to Oravita, in south-western Romania, which saw its highest temperature, 22.2 degrees, on January 7th 2001. Bucharest had its highest January temperature, 18 degrees Celsius back in 2002. 

The weather is going to get cooler in Romania starting Friday with precipitations, which are even going to turn into snow and sleet in the mountains and some regions in the country's west, center and north-east. Even so, the weather is still warmer than usual for this time of the year and according to meteorologists, the year 2022 was the warmest in recorded history with an average annual temperature of 11.7 degrees Celsius. The unusually high temperatures this month have created a lot of problems to farmers as extreme drought has been forecast for the southern regions while in the north trees are expected to sprout and then freeze. The wheat, rape and barley crops haven't been affected but the trees are expected to bear the brunt of the latest extremely high temperatures as their fruit are going to be compromised if temperatures drop significantly.  

Winters have become increasingly warm, snowfalls have been replaced by rain and the present global warming has a tendency to deepen. 2022 was the fifth warmest in Romania since 1880, when weather reports have been consistently made. According to US experts, global temperatures are getting higher and higher while extreme weather phenomena have become more frequent.

The world's average temperature is now 1.1, 1.2 degrees higher than in the pre-industrial era and will continue to rise, unless humankind gives ups the use of fossil fuel. Climate change has caused extreme weather phenomena all over the world in 2022. Europe was in for its hottest summer in history, while floods killed 17 hundred people in Pakistan and caused damage to the infrastructure. Drought devastated crops in Uganda and wildfires wreaked havoc on the Mediterranean countries.

(bill)