Tropical nights, endless summers and days of almost gone frost:how the climate has changed in Italy in the last 40 years

A report from Il Meteo analyzed how annual temperatures have changed from 1985 to today in various Italian cities

Over the last forty years, summers in Italy have become increasingly longer and increasingly hotter.Yet another confirmation comes from research carried out by The Weather and published on Corriere della Sera.A team of meteorologists analyzed 185 million data, in a time interval between 1985 and 2023, to study the evolution of five parameters:average annual temperature, anomaly in the average monthly temperature, tropical nights (when the minimum never drops below 20 degrees), days of frost and extreme heat.«Over the last forty years we have recorded constantly increasing temperatures, with a surge in the last five years», explains Lorenzo Tedici, meteorologist at The Weather and among the authors of the «Report on the Climate of the 21st Century», published recently.

The role of climate change

Climate change is obviously at the root of this situation.The greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere prevent part of the sun's rays from being reflected back into space, effectively trapping them in the atmosphere and causing an increase in temperatures, not only in summer.The scientific community has long maintained that this is a phenomenon attributable not to natural cycles of the planet but to human behavior and, in particular, to the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.«We are pumping exorbitant quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere», comments Mattia Gussoni, also one of the authors of the report The Weather forecast.

How the temperature changes in Italian cities

The research by the team of meteorologists has highlighted that Rieti is the capital with the most marked increase in average annual temperature:from 13 degrees in the 1980s to over 17 degrees in 2023.Followed by Forlì, Reggio Emilia and Cuneo (which went from 9.6 to 12.5°C).As regards large cities, Turin has recorded a +2.2°C in the space of forty years, Milan +1.9°C, Rome +1.8°C.Furthermore, in the capital, freezing days have become a real rarity.In the 1980s, there were an average of 25 per year, today only one, destined to disappear by 2030.«An increase of 2 degrees may seem small, but from a climatic point of view this represents a change in weather conditions», explain the meteorologists of The Weather.Another emblematic indicator is that relating to tropical nights, where the minimum temperature never drops below 20 degrees.In this case, it is above all the northern cities that suffer.In Bergamo, tropical nights went from 8 (in 1985) to 62 (in 2023), in Milan from 21 to 71, in Padua from 44 to 80.

A new record for the hottest day on record?

And to confirm the direction in which we are moving, preliminary data from Copernicus - the service financed by the European Union which studies, among other things, climate change - say that Sunday 21 July 2024 could go down in history as the day hottest ever recorded.The previous record dates back to just one year ago, on July 6, 2023, when the global average temperature reached 17.08°C.In recent days, the thermometer has risen to 17.09°C, but the data is yet to be confirmed.“What is really disconcerting is how big the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and previous temperature records,” observed Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus.“We are now in truly uncharted territory, and as the climate continues to warm, we are set to see new records broken in the months and years ahead.”

On the cover:The dry lawn in front of the Basilica of San Giovanni, in Rome, 19 August 2023 (ANSA/Angelo Carconi)