The exceptional heatwave which baked Cyprus in the final weeks of lockdown has broken records – in some cases by up to 6 degrees – the meteorological office announced on Wednesday.
The data showed that Paphos airport witnessed the sharpest increase based on the daily highest temperature.
On May 17, the airport was hit by a chart-topping temperature of 42.5 degrees, a whopping 6.2 degrees higher than the previous record of 36.3 set in 1988.
“We do get hot days during May, but this is something that has never happened before,” Eric Kitas, of KitasWeather portal, told the Cyprus Mail.
Polis logged a new record of 41.7 degrees in May 2020. This leaped above the previous highest temperature (36.6 in 2019) by 5.1 degrees.
In Limassol, the Cyprus University of Technology recorded a new high of 42.9 degrees, a difference of 4.3 degrees compared to the 38.6 in 1995.
“Because it’s the first time we have such extreme heat on records we don’t know if this happened before weather stations were placed in the area, but probably most of us won’t experience something like that again,” Kitas said.
“That was very, very extreme.”
The electricity authority (EAC) said last month that May this year broke the record for energy consumption due to the heatwave.
According to deputy spokesperson Christos Hadjilaos, average energy consumption for May is usually around 600MW, while the maximum output on Tuesday, May 19, topped 910MW.
“It is an unprecedented situation for May; I don’t remember having high temperatures for so many days in a row in previous years,” he said.
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