Throughout March Spain has grappled with heavy rainfall, flooding and strong winds and there appears to be no end to the unusual weather patterns as weather forecasters warn the bout of bad weather is to continue into April. Brits travelling to the Balearics and Spain may want to swap their sunhats for umbrellas as the wet and miserable weather looks to disrupt any Easter holiday plans.
Jason Nicholls, lead international forecaster for AccuWeather, believes the overall rainfall will be average above normal for much of Spain/Majorca for April. Speaking to the Express he said: “The wetter than usual pattern should continue into mid-April. Much of Majorca and eastern Spain have received five times to as much as 10 times their normal rainfall for the month of March thus far.
“To give you an example, Palma De Mallorca normally receives around 25mm of rain in March but has received nearly 115mm of rain so far in March.”
The forecaster says the unusually wet March is due “to a fairly consistent pattern of a strong ridge setting up near the UK and northern Europe which resulted in a few slow-moving lows being forced to the south into the Iberian Peninsula”.
Although the end of March has brought some highly anticipated sunshine the relief from the downpours won’t last for long.
Ruben del Campo, a meteorologist and spokesperson for Aemet, told the Express: “Wet and rainy weather is possible to return towards the middle of next week in some areas of Spain, especially in the west and south of the mainland.
“Spring is a period in which the atmosphere exhibits very dynamic behaviour, making it more difficult for numerical weather forecasting models to obtain an accurate response than for other seasons.
“Typically, storms travel from west to east and cross the Atlantic along a route north of our latitudes. They travel from Newfoundland to Scandinavia through Iceland and the United Kingdom.
“This is why those regions and countries are so rainy. But during this month of March, the usual route has been blocked by an anticyclone, which is precisely why it is called a ‘blocking’ anticyclone. These types of anticyclones can be very persistent and remain in the same geographic area for several weeks. Therefore, the storms had to travel a less usual route, further south, which led them directly to the Iberian Peninsula.”
He added: “In Majorca a combination of low pressure systems and wet ‘levante’ winds caused rains along the beginning of March.”
The latest unstable weather could arrive sometime on April 4 or 5 with some forecasters encouraging people to make the most of the current spell of sunny weather over most of Spain until the April showers make their presence felt. Ruben adds that Palma Airport saw largest amount of rainfall in Majorca during March whilst some Spanish cities experienced “double the usual amount for spring as a whole”.
He said: “Some cities in Andalusia, such as Córdoba, reached over 300 liters per square meter in about twenty days. This amount is double the usual amount for spring as a whole. In the Central System, near Madrid, Puerto de Navacerrada reached almost 600 liters per square meter.”
He added: “In Majorca, the rainiest location compared to normal values was Palma Airport: 113 litres compared to the usual 23 litres per square meter, which means it rained about five times more than normal.”
