April heatwave sets Swiss temperature records
Exceptionally warm weather conditions broke daily temperature records for April in some parts of Switzerland at the weekend.
Do you want to read our weekly top stories? Subscribe here.
Saturday saw the first summery day of the year in many places on the northern side of the Alps with temperatures of above 25 degrees Celcius. This is exceptionally early. Some measuring stations recorded the warmest ever April temperatures on Saturday.
The temperatures were influenced by lots of sunshine, warm air from the south and a high pressure area in which the air sinks downwards and warms up further.
More
October starts with record high temperatures in Switzerland
It got warmest in Basel with the help of the southwest wind. There it was a midsummer 28.8°C in the afternoon. It was also very warm in Chur with the help of a foehn – a weather system typical to the Swiss mountainous terrain. There the 28.5°C was even significantly higher than the previous April record of 27.7°C.
It is particularly noteworthy that some monthly records have already been broken at the beginning of April. In previous years, new records have been set in the last third of the month.
If you compare the weekend highs with the previous highest temperatures recorded in the first third of April, you can clearly see how exceptionally warm it was. For example, in Interlaken it was over 4 degrees higher on Saturday than ever before during this period.
More
2023 was second hottest year on record, says Swiss weather service
Exceptionally warm conditions are also expected on Sunday and Monday. Depending on the duration of sunshine, the temperatures are likely to be in a similar range again, and there could be new records at some stations.
Forecaster expect the “heatwave” to end on Tuesday with the arrival of a cold front that will return temperatures to normal levels for the time of year.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
Adapted from German by DeepL/mga
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.