HUMIDITY has reached levels never recorded before along the Valencia and Costa Blanca coast, with dew points closing in on the highest ever measured on Earth.
The Valencia Meteorological Association (AVAMET), the body of professional and volunteer meteorologists that runs a network of weather stations across the region, said its sensors logged dew points of up to 30C on Thursday afternoon.
Readings hit those levels at stations dotted along the coast and inland comarcas (districts) of Valencia and Alicante province, including several towns on the northern Costa Blanca.
AVAMET said that the readings were ‘another thing we had never seen before’.
Dew point differs humidity from temperature as it measures point at which the air needs to cool to before the moisture inside it starts condensing into liquid, and the higher that temperature runs, the more water vapour the air is actually holding.
A dew point in the low 30s Celsius is rare enough that AVAMET reached for the only meaningful comparison on record.
The group said Thursday’s readings sat just 5C below the highest dew point ever measured on Earth, recorded on the coast of Saudi Arabia in 2003.
At 3pm on July 8 that year, the city of Dhahran logged a dew point of 35C alongside an air temperature of 42C, producing a heat index — the ‘feels like’ temperature — of more than 81C, according to Guinness World Records.
A dew point of 35C is considered close to the upper limit of what a healthy body can tolerate for more than a few hours, because air that saturated stops sweat evaporating off the skin, the one mechanism the body has to shed heat.
Thursday’s Valencia region readings fell short of that extreme, but they came closer than anywhere in Spain has before.
On the Costa Blanca itself, Crevillent, a Vega Baja town inland from Elche and the resorts around Torrevieja, recorded a dew point of 29.8C and a heat index of 53C.
Further north, Callosa d’en Sarria, in the hills above Benidorm and Altea, hit a dew point of 29.6C.
In the Marina Alta, the villages of el Verger and l’Atzubia — both a short drive inland from Denia and Javea — recorded dew points of 29.1C and 29.3C respectively, with heat indices of 55C at both.
The single most extreme reading came further inland, in Sumacarcer, a village in the Ribera Alta comarca of Valencia province, well away from the coast.
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There, the heat index reached 63C shortly after 3pm, produced by an air temperature of 40.1C combined with 60% humidity and a dew point of 30.9C.
At that level of humidity, even standing still in the shade offers little relief, because the air is too saturated for sweat to evaporate and carry heat away from the body.
That combination puts most strain on the people who make up a large share of Spain’s coastal population: older residents, and anyone with an existing heart or respiratory condition.
Thursday’s spike came in the middle of Spain’s third heatwave of the summer, according to the AEMET, the country’s state weather agency.
AEMET said the heat peaked in the Valencia region between Tuesday and Friday this week, with Thursday the most intense day.
Inland stations bore the brunt of the heat itself. Bicorp, a village in Valencia’s Canal de Navarres district, hit 43.9C, the hottest reading recorded anywhere in the region on Thursday.
Villena and Alcoi, both inland towns in Alicante province, reached 43.7C and 43.5C respectively, placing them among Spain’s 10 hottest stations of the day.
The three provincial capitals fared comparatively better. Alicante reached 33.8C, Castellon 32.5C and Valencia city 32C.
AEMET said the first 18 days of July ran 3.4C above the average for the period, itself six tenths of a degree hotter than the previous record, set in July 2015.
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