Europe swelters in record-breaking heat wave

PARIS－France, Spain and other western European countries sweltered over the weekend under a blistering heat wave that has sparked forest fires and concerns that such early summer blasts of hot weather will now become the norm.

The weekend's soaring temperatures were the peak of a heat wave in line with scientists' predictions that such phenomena will now strike earlier in the year because of global warming.

The popular French southwestern seaside resort of Biarritz endured its highest all-time temperature on Saturday afternoon, 42.9 C, the state forecaster Meteo France said as authorities urged vigilance from the central western coast to the Spanish border.

The temperature in many parts of the region surpassed 40 C, although storms were expected on the Atlantic coast on Sunday evening, the first signs that the stifling temperatures would "gradually regress to concern only the eastern part of the country", Meteo France said.

Queues of hundreds of people and traffic jams formed outside aquatic leisure parks in France, with people seeing water as the only refuge from the heat.

With the River Seine off limits to bathing, scorched Parisians took refuge in the city's fountains.

It was the earliest heat wave recorded in France since 1947, said Matthieu Sorel, a climatologist at Meteo France, as records for June fell in a dozen areas, leading him to call the weather a "marker of climate change".

A blaze triggered by the firing of an artillery shell in military training in the Var region of southern France was burning about 200 hectares of vegetation, local authorities said.

"There is no threat to anyone except 2,500 sheep that are being evacuated and taken to safety," a local fire brigade chief said.

The fire came from the Canjeurs military camp, the biggest such training site in Western Europe.

Fire services' work was impeded by the presence of non-exploded munitions in the deserted area, but four Canadair aircraft were deployed to water-bomb the fires.

Forest fires in Spain on Saturday had burned nearly 20,000 hectares of land in the northwest Sierra de la Culebra region.

The flames forced several hundred people from their homes, and 14 villages were evacuated.

Temperatures above 40 C were forecast in parts of the country on Saturday, with highs of 43 C expected in the northeastern city of Zaragoza. There have also been fires in Germany.

In Italy the heat wave has sparked emergencies in at least four cities and put half of the agricultural production in the north at drought risk.

Experts warned the high temperatures were caused by worrying climate change trends.

"As a result of climate change, heat waves are starting earlier," said Clare Nullis, a spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.

"What we're witnessing today is unfortunately a foretaste of the future" if concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise and push global warming toward 2 C from preindustrial levels, she said.

Agencies - Xinhua