The month of April has left the most atypical stamps in the spring of 2023. The month closed with a phenomenon as typical of summer as the temperatures we have suffered in recent days: a humid blowout, together with a strong summer storm that left a downpour of water in the Murcia region.
A wet blowout. But what exactly is a blowout? As explained by the State Meteorological Agency, AEMET, these are convective air currents, that is, winds that are generated by differences between the temperatures in the air masses located in different parts of an area.
The main characteristic of these is that the air current moves vertically towards the ground. Downbursts are usually generated in cumulonimbus clouds, a type of cloud that also has a vertical structure and tends to cause precipitation and storms.
Bursts usually have a relatively short duration (between 5 and 30 minutes) and can be of several types: humid (as in the case of the recent one in Murcia) in which the moisture from the cloud is dragged to the ground in the form of precipitation ; dry, in which case the moisture displaced towards the ground meets a mass of dry air that prevents it from reaching the ground as precipitation, and even warm.
Balance of damages. One of the main victims of this phenomenon was the Warm Up festival, held in the capital of the region. Numerous concerts had to be canceled and attendees had to seek shelter from the rain in the area.
According to local media reports, the rains caused damage to the infrastructure that resulted in power outages. To this we had to add the fall of trees. Fortunately, there have been no fatalities to be regretted, as if it happened in the summer of 2022 when a strong gust of wind associated with a blowout knocked down part of the decorations of the Medusa festival held in Cullera, Valencia.
Summer storms… in spring. The weather for the month of April has been anything but conventional. A traditionally rainy month has witnessed a worrying situation of drought. The rains of this last weekend neither respond to the usual patterns of spring rains nor will they serve to alleviate a situation that has been brewing for months.
The storms, yes, have been accompanied by a significant drop in temperatures, undoubtedly good news after a few days under the threat of the so-called “Iberian oven”.
More heat and stability. Everything indicates that May is coming with the same trend that has been observed in the last weeks of April. That is, with stability and warmer temperatures than usual in different areas. Tomorrow Wednesday, for example, it will be the eastern Cantabrian area that will witness temperatures above average.
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Image | NWS Phoenix, Wikimedia Commons
