Hot weather likely to last until October

The hot and humid weather is likely to continue for another two months, the weather bureau said yesterday.

The weather in Qatar normally begins turning pleasant by the middle or end of September, but that is not likely to happen

this year.

It is going to be an extended summer this time and high temperatures and humidity levels will remain until a little later.

In a special bulletin issued yesterday, Qatar’s Meteorology Department said that in July the temperature in Doha was 6.3 degrees Celsius higher than the long-term average.

The average in July is 41.9 degrees Celsius in Doha, but this year it was 48.2 degrees Celsius.

In places like Messaieed and near Qatar University, the average was 50 degrees Celsius, which was 7.4 degrees higher than the long-term mean.

The Meteorology Department said that based on 10 Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models and according to the World Meteorological Organisation(WMO), higher temperatures will continue, particularly in the Middle East and the Arabian Gulf until October. Relative humidity will also remain high during this period. The models indicate that during these months there is 70 percent probability that mercury levels will remain higher than average in the Gulf and Middle East.

This probability is 60 percent for Qatar. The long-term average temperature for August is 40.9 degrees Celsius, but there is likelihood of the temperatures being more this time.

The Department has warned that relative humidity will be more during these months as compared to previous years, and the average for August is likely to be 70 percent.

The rise in relative humidity over the next two months, compared to previous years, would be due to unusually light surface wind, slack pressure gradient and sea breeze for longer durations in the day.

The Department said that the entire planet has been seeing weather fluctuations, so there are alterations in weather conditions in many parts of the world, especially in the Middle East and South Asia, where there has been a rise in temperature and relative humidity due to many reasons, including the greenhouse effect.

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The fluctuations are also due to changes that occur on the surface of the sun.

As a result of the solar cycle, which began in 2008 and ends in 2020, enormous explosions on the sun’s surface send heat waves through space and into our atmosphere, causing an increase in temperature on the planet.

El Nino effect has an impact, too.

Australia’s meteorological authority had announced the El Nino phenomenon on August 4.

El Nino is characterised by the warmth of the water surface in the Pacific which leads to an increase in temperatures, especially in Asia and parts of Europe and East Africa, the weather bureau’s bulletin said.

THE PENINSULA