To date, there are records of ‘tropical night’ on nine of these 21 days in November.
Apart from the tropical nights, yesterday Funchal reached a top temperature of 28.2° which took everyone by surprise for this time of year.
Tropical nights are an increasingly recurring phenomenon throughout the year in the Madeira Archipelago
Today we were faced with very significant values of surface air temperature recorded after (yet another) ‘tropical night’.
Contrary to what many may think, this is a phenomenon that has nothing to do with the well-known tropical weather.
‘Tropical nights’ are related, yes, to nights in which the minimum air temperature does not drop below 20 ºC.
This is a situation that, in the Madeira Archipelago, particularly in locations close to the coast, naturally occurs more frequently during the summer period, although it is increasingly spaced out in time and therefore the occurrence of nights is no longer a rarity. tropical, especially during the spring and autumn seasons.
The tropical temperatures recorded last night are not an isolated episode at this time of year. Less frequent at this time of year is the air temperature reaching such significant values, as was the case with the 26.0 ºC recorded during the early hours of Ponta do Sol/Lugar de Baixo, or even the 24.1 ºC recorded in Funchal/Observatório.
Only in this month of November, until today, the network of Automatic Meteorological Stations (EMA) of the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA) in the Madeira Archipelago – currently with 18 active EMAs on the island of Madeira and 1 in Porto Santo – recorded minimum temperatures with tropical night values on nine of these 21 days.
Where this is most common is in Porto Moniz, Ponta do Sol/Lugar de Baixo, Funchal/Lido, and Santa Cruz/Airport.
In Porto Moniz there were five tropical nights experienced this month: day 2/20.5 ºC; 10/20.4 ºC; 12/20.4 ºC; 13/20.5 ºC; 15/20.1 ºC. In Ponta do Sol/Lugar de Baixo: 11/20.3 ºC; 21/21.5 ºC. Funchal/Lido: 2/20.0 ºC; 3/20.6 ºC; 21/20.6 ºC. Santa Cruz/Airport: 13/20.5 ºC; 16/20.1 ºC.
If you are waiting for the cooler weather, especially at night making it more comfortable to sleep, then a change is on the way. Polar air will push down over the weekend bringing a lot of snow to Northern Europe, and cooler temperatures for us from next week more noticeable at night.