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Date Published: 18/02/2025

Spain heading for second winter without a cold snap

A third year without a cold wave would be “worrying”, according to meteorologists

The winter season of 2025 in Spain will likely pass by without us ever having to suffer through a real cold snap. If the forecast plays out, then this will be the second consecutive year without temperatures low enough for a true cold wave.

This is according to Meteored expert Samuel Biener, who went on to say that if these conditions persist into a third year, the situation would not only be highly “unusual”, it would be downright “worrying.”

While many parts of Spain have experienced freezing nights, frost and even snowfall, meteorologically speaking, we haven’t come close to meeting the conditions needed for a cold snap. And although a frigid air mass is expected to sweep over a large part of Europe later this week, Spain will again dodge the coolest temperatures.

And so it seems that Spain will sail into spring, which begins on March 1, without any extreme winter weather episodes.

“These cold episodes are less common in Spain and, in addition, they are less intense. What we are seeing is that extremely low temperatures that were previously more frequent are now increasingly spaced out over time,” the meteorologist explained.

“We must not confuse winter cold with cold waves,” he added. In Spain, a cold snap needs to last at least three consecutive days, during which time at least 10% of the weather stations must record minimum temperatures below the 5% percentile.

What we have seen instead is more and more subtropical air masses with winds blowing in from the west or southwest. While these bring a lot of rain, they also prevent the entry of cold air.

Although 2025 is on track to be the second consecutive year without a cold snap, this is far from unheard of. In fact, Spain experienced similar unusually warm winters in 1997 and 1998, as well as in 2000 and 2001 and again in 2013 and 2014.

However, the increase in the frequency of these “stops” is something that is beginning to worry experts: “Let's hope that this changes next year, because it would be the first time, since we have records, that there would be no cold waves in three winters in a row, something unusual.”

What is out of the ordinary is that Spain has been transitioning towards a La Niña phase for some months now, something which should have pulled the temperatures down.

On the contrary, by the end of February, temperatures of 1 to 3 ºC above the average will more than likely be recorded, giving 2025 a good chance of becoming the hottest winter of all time.

As for the effects of global warming and whether something can still be done to slow it down, the specialist said he feels “realistic, if not pessimistic” and believes that “even if greenhouse gas emissions were to stop all over the world tomorrow, their effects would continue for decades, if not centuries, in the atmosphere.”

One of the objectives to reduce the impact of climate change was to limit global temperature rise to 2°C this century and to strive to limit this increase to 1.5°C, as agreed in the Paris Agreement. However, in the last year, we have already exceeded the first set temperatures, so the prognosis could be better.

"If we continue to emit greenhouse gases unchecked, the other scenarios, for example exceeding the threshold of 2 or 4 ºC, could have catastrophic consequences for many areas of the world," he warned, even leaving large parts of the planet completely uninhabitable in the future.

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Image: Freepik

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