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WEATHER

Heatwave to grip Italy until end of July

Italy's stifling heatwave is set to continue into next week, keeping temperatures in the high thirties.

Heatwave to grip Italy until end of July
A woman walks in the shade of a small street in central Rome on Saturday. Photo: Gabriel Buoys/AFP

Weather experts said the heatwave, called Caronte, will continue over the next week before subsiding towards the end of the month.

The endless heat looks as if it will propel July 2015 into the record books as the hottest month ever.

“Considering it's only July, and not in the summer in its entirety, it is the most intense heat wave in 70 years,” Edoardo Ferrara, a meteorologist with 3bmeteo.com, said on Friday.

Temperatures will peak at 40 degrees Celsius in parts of Italy, before cooling off towards the end of the month, bringing potential thunderstorms to the north and central Italy.


Forecast temperatures for 12pm on Monday. Source: meteo.it

Over 100 people have died of the heat since the start of the month, with Arpa Piedmont saying on Friday that the heatwave had claimed the lives of 140 pensioners in the region alone. Other lives have been claimed in Liguria, Tuscany and Sardinia.

Current hot temperatures are reminiscent of the summer of 2003, when the whole of Europe was gripped by a heatwave that killed 18,000 people in Italy alone.

The current heatwave has caused the number of calls to the emergency services in Italy to spike by around 10 percent.
 

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WEATHER

Denmark records deepest snow level for 13 years

Blizzards in Denmark this week have resulted in the greatest depth of snow measured in the country for 13 years.

Denmark records deepest snow level for 13 years

A half-metre of snow, measured at Hald near East Jutland town Randers, is the deepest to have occurred in Denmark since January 2011, national meteorological agency DMI said.

The measurement was taken by the weather agency at 8am on Thursday.

Around 20-30 centimetres of snow was on the ground across most of northern and eastern Jutland by Thursday, as blizzards peaked resulting in significant disruptions to traffic and transport.

A much greater volume of snow fell in 2011, however, when over 100 centimetres fell on Baltic Sea island Bornholm during a post-Christmas blizzard, which saw as much as 135 centimetres on Bornholm at the end of December 2010.

READ ALSO: Denmark’s January storms could be fourth extreme weather event in three months

With snowfall at its heaviest for over a decade, Wednesday saw a new rainfall record. The 59 millimetres which fell at Svendborg on the island of Funen was the most for a January day in Denmark since 1886. Some 9 weather stations across Funen and Bornholm measured over 50cm of rain.

DMI said that the severe weather now looks to have peaked.

“We do not expect any more weather records to be set in the next 24 hours. But we are looking at some very cold upcoming days,” DMI meteorologist and press spokesperson Herdis Damberg told news wire Ritzau.

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