Since midnight, temperatures have remained above 20ºC after rising 3.6ºC in 10 minutes.
It was ‘tropical’ – since midnight – this hot and unusual Christmas morning in Ponta do Sol/Lugar de Baixo.
Although technically it cannot be considered a ‘tropical night’, because surface air temperatures were below 20ºC from sunset until very close to midnight, the fact is that in the minutes leading up to Christmas Day there was a very significant inversion in ambient temperature, with an extraordinary rise of 3.6ºC in just 10 minutes, going from 17.2ºC, recorded at 23:4, to 20.8ºC, at 23:5. From then on, it remained above 20ºC throughout the early hours of Christmas Day.
At midnight, the IPMA weather station located in Lugar de Baixo recorded 21.1 ºC. Throughout the night it did not drop below 20.6 ºC (02:20) and rose to 23.2 ºC in the minutes before sunrise.
The Ponta do Sol/Lugar de Baixo station was the only one in the IPMA network in the Madeira Archipelago (18 on the island of Madeira, 1 in Porto Santo and 1 in Selvagem Grande) to record temperatures above 20 ºC throughout the night. As expected, the Pico do Areeiro station was the coldest. Temperatures during the night ranged between a minimum of 3.1 ºC and a maximum of 5.3 ºC.