Exhausting days and "stifling nights": Meteo-France is extending the orange heatwave alert to 26 new departments from Monday, bringing the total to 39 in a large southern half of France.
Thirteen departments have already been on orange heatwave alert since Sunday noon. Twenty-six others, including Vendée and Indre-et-Loire, will switch to orange alert from Monday noon, in turn affected by the first heatwave of 2024.
"An extension of the orange alert to other departments bordering those already on orange alert is not excluded" on the occasion of the bulletin which will be broadcast on Monday at 4:00 p.m., specifies Meteo-France.
"Monday will be extremely hot for a large part of the south," Tristan Amm, a forecaster for Meteo-France, told AFP on Sunday.
He anticipates "stifling nights" in this southern half at the start of the week, with mercury which "will not fall below 25 degrees in New Aquitaine, in the south of Toulouse or even along the Rhone valley as far as the Mediterranean".
In these regions, it could still be over 30 degrees around midnight.
"The heat will decrease from the middle of next week with maximum temperatures that will become more reasonable", even if "it will remain very hot in the south, particularly around the Mediterranean", underlines Tristan Amm.
In the Paris region, where most of the Olympic events are taking place, "the peak of heat should be on Tuesday, when maximum temperatures will be around 34-35 degrees," explains Tristan Amm.
In this area, "the nights from Tuesday to Wednesday and from Wednesday to Thursday will be quite warm. The mercury will struggle to drop below 20 degrees," continues the Meteo-France forecaster.
– Wet sheets at the windows –
On Sunday, the beach at Bordeaux Lac, in the north of the Gironde city, was crowded, with the thermometer reaching a staggering 35 degrees after 4 p.m.
Dominique Bouril, 68, fled the heat of her home "where it's already 26, 27 degrees," she told AFP. "The traffic to get out of Bordeaux and go to the ocean is hell anyway, we're much better off here. I'll come back tomorrow," smiles the blonde retiree with a very tanned complexion.
To keep her house cool, Pierrette, 66, has installed "three fans (...) and soaked sheets on the windows," she says from the patch of grass where she gives her grandchildren a snack.
A little further on, twenty-something Camille Berneaux is settled in with her three roommates: "We usually come here for the heatwaves but as they are more and more frequent, we come often," she observes.
The technical explanation for this high heat? A "cold drop that isolates itself off the coast of Portugal, with winds that wrap around this depression, which draws extremely hot air from the Iberian peninsula to our country", explains Tristan Amm, while "high pressure over France acts like a lid that traps this hot air and heats it up even more".
In particular, it is recommended to drink water several times a day, to avoid going out during the hottest hours of the day, and to limit sports and physical activities.
"Heat waves are an emblematic manifestation of our climate change, they are increasingly intense, frequent, early and long," stressed Matthieu Sorel, climatologist, during a press briefing on Saturday by Meteo-France.
In France, before 1989, there was "an average of one heat wave every five years", whereas "since 2000 they have occurred at an annual frequency". These heat waves, the specialist warned, "will be twice as numerous within 30 years".
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