2021 Weather Report for Pinoso

Pinoso has a weather station that forms a part of the AEMET network. AEMET is the Spanish Met Office, Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. So far as I know the weather station for AEMET is in the centre of Pinoso, at the Instituto José Marhuenda Prats. I think it's at the school because the bloke who started it all up taught there though that may be wrong. The man is real enough though, Agapito - always called Cápito - Gonzálvez. He's been Mr Weather in Pinoso for over 30 years now. 

If you haven't seen the AEMET site this link should go directly to the observations over the past few days. Click around the site and you'll find forecasts and a whole lot more.

There is another weather station out at Rodriguillo, which was damaged when the reed beds there went on fire in the summer. Capito got it up and running again within 8 days. There's another another on the Yecla road out of Pinoso. These two stations log their recordings on the Valencian Meteorological Association website - AVAMET. According to that website there's a third station in Pinoso at l'Herrada which, I think, is just off the road from Culebrón to Ubeda. 

If you want to have a look at the Valencia website it's on this link though it does tend to be a bit fickle and constantly change from the Castilian version to the Valencian version. If the site plays up you want Alicante Province and mid Vinalopó or in the Territori section Província d'Alacant and El Medio Vinalopó or el Vinalopó Mitjà. You can choose the date for the records too. The button to change between Castilian and Valencian is at the top right but, as I say, it's all a bit wobbly.

Anyway Capito does these roundups for the monthly weather reports. Again they tend to get published in Valenciano so this is my interpretation of his roundup for 2021. 

During 2021 it rained 68 days and there were 15 days when the temperature fell below freezing. On the other hand there were 128 days of full sun and 163 days with sunny spells as against 52 cloudy days and 22 days with full cloud cover. 

There were 162 days with dew, 22 days with mist and 2 days with hail. There was no snow recorded in 2021. There were storms on 6 days.

The hottest day of the year was the 15th August when it got to 42.5ºC and the coldest day was the 6th January when the temperature dropped to -5ºC. 

The mean high was 23ºC and the mean low was 9.7ºC.

Over the whole year 313 litres of water fell on every square metre of Pinoso and the wettest day of the year was 23rd May when we got 44 of them.

There were 808 hours when the temperature was 7ºC or below but just 60 hours when it was below freezing. Those 60 cold hours being spread between 20 different days. 

There were 80 days when the temperature was greater than 30ºC and 7 days when more than 10 litres of rain fell.

The windiest day was 12th February when it blew at 73km/h

The day when the highest recorded temperature was the lowest of the year (get that?) was 8th January, when it only got to 4.5ºC  and the day when the lowest recorded temperature was the highest was the 12th July when it never dropped below 22.5ºC. 

The overall coldest day of the year was 5th January with a mean temperature was just 2.5ºC, and the opposite was the 15th August when the mean temperature was 31.8ºC.

Snow

My guess is that you know that it snowed here yesterday. A good thick layer of snow in Culebrón. I missed most of it. In fact I must be the only person in Culebrón who doesn't have a photo of somewhere looking very Christmas card. I took a few snaps today but by then the thaw was well under way.

There was 33mm of precipitation in Pinoso which, Google tells me, normally bulks up to about 33cm of snow. I'd have said it was less than that, maybe 15cm, but I wasn't here to see the snow at its height so I am not a reliable source.

I drove to work through reasonably heavy falling snow but, by the time I got to work, the snow was nasty wet rain instead. Cieza is nearly 400 metres lower than Culebrón. By the time I came home the ploughs had done their stuff and I followed the car width wet tarmac ribbon, hemmed in by snow, occasionally hitting big compacted lumps, all the way home. It wasn't easy getting up the slope to the house though and I had to dig the snow away to actually get the car into our yard. It's been melting like mad today. Water pouring off buildings and roads looking very picturesque in the bright sunlight.

At the height of the snowfall Maggie was persuaded by friends to take the lift offered in a four wheel drive and leave her car in town. She probably couldn't have got home anyway as the main road that passes our house was closed. Apparently the closure was because so many cars were sliding off the road that the Guardia Civil thought it the best move.

Lots of the comments against the photos that Britons living around here posted on Facebook were from friends surprised that it had snowed in Spain. Actually Spanish snow isn't at all unusual.

For a long time now Spain has often claimed to be the second most mountainous country in Europe after Switzerland. Again, with the help of Google, I understand that the criteria for that claim are not clear and that places like Norway, Slovenia, Greece, Austria and Italy beat it on most of the obvious measures. Nonetheless it is a pretty high country in general and it can, authentically, claim to have the highest percentage of its population living in high areas in Europe. Everybody knows you get snow on top of mountains. Any photo of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania proves that. So lots of Spaniards who live in the Pyrenees, up the Sierra Nevada or in the Picos de Europa have to live with plenty of snow every year. Spain has stacks of ski resorts.

The Spanish word for Hell is infierno. The Spanish word for winter is invierno. An old joke about Madrid says nine months of winter and three months of Hell. It's droller in Spanish.

We originally considered living in Burgos. Some Spanish chums warned us off by saying it was like Siberia in winter. We had a couple of different pals who lived there. One of them told the story of entertaining a group of Muscovites on some sort of International Exchange. The Muscovites complained that Burgos was too cold.

One of the WhatsApp jokes that I got yesterday about the weather was a temperature scale. It argued that when the temperature dropped below 24ºC people from Seville put an extra blanket on the bed. The mentions of Burgos suggested that its people would button up their shirts, as they drank ice cold beer and ate ice cream on the cafe terraces, as temperatures sank to -8ºC and that they would only actually go inside the bar when temperature dropped to absolute zero.

Whenever there is a description of the Spanish Civil War Battle of the Ebro, fought around the area that includes the city of Teruel in Aragon, there is always mention of the number of soldiers who froze to death because of the low, low temperatures. Figures vary but it seems that they were regularly below -20ºC

Maggie and I were trying to decide if it's the third or fourth time it's snowed on us whilst we've been here. My photo albums seem to suggest that it has been two reasonably heavy snowfalls, with another that barely counted, before this one. This weeks fall is definitely the heaviest we've experienced here. So, it may be relatively unusual that it snowed in Alicante and Murcia this week but it's not at all odd for it to snow in Spain.

And, whilst we're on the topic of sunny Spain I'd just warn you that should you ever decide to go to Galicia or any bit of Green Spain, up Asturias and Cantabria way, whenever those places are on the news for whatever reason it always seems to be raining.

Wrap up warm.