The prediction comes from a study carried out by three researchers from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Rita Cardoso, Daniela Lima and Pedro Soares) who looked at the impact of climate change in the country.

Periods of extreme heat will not only become more frequent but also longer, including outside the summer months.

The article “How persistent and hazardous will extreme temperature events become in a warming Portugal?”, recently published in the scientific journal “Weather and Climate Extremes”, paints a picture that the authors themselves consider “worrying” for the future, as Rita Cardoso points out in an interview with TVI/CNN Portugal.

The researcher emphasises that we are talking about extreme phenomena that used to be rare, but that will become more and more common.

The work indicates that, as a rule, Portugal used to have one to two heat waves per year, but in the best scenario it will have three to four in the last three decades of this 21st century.

In the worst-case scenario, if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed, heat waves risk being 10 to 12 per year.

In addition to being more common, heat waves will also be longer with average durations of 7 to 8 days in the best-case scenario or 10 to 11 days in the most negative forecasts.