Tenerife Airport Logs Spain's Hottest and 'Impossible' Cold
Tenerife South Airport's weather station bizarrely recorded both Spain's highest temperature at 33.9°C and an unlikely -19.8°C on the same day, suggesting a data error.
On Thursday, February 12, something strange happened at Tenerife South Airport's weather station. It seemed to record both the highest and one of the lowest temperatures in Spain on the same day.
According to Spain's weather agency (Aemet), the airport reported a scorching 33.9 degrees Celsius at 6:30 PM. But at the same spot, a temperature of -19.8 degrees Celsius was also noted. This extremely cold reading is highly unlikely to be real in such a short time, suggesting there was a mistake in the data.
To put that -19.8 degrees into perspective, the next coldest place in Spain was Cap de Vaquèira in Lleida, where it was -6.7 degrees Celsius at 10:20 AM. The huge difference of over ten degrees makes the Tenerife figure stand out as very unusual, even during a winter storm on mainland Spain.
Meanwhile, Aemet confirmed that the Canary Islands were not affected by Storm Nils, which was hitting mainland Spain. In fact, on this Thursday, half of the ten warmest places in Spain were in the Canary Islands. After Tenerife South Airport's 33.9 degrees, the other warm spots included Águilas (Murcia), Tejeda and La Aldea de San Nicolás (Gran Canaria), and Vallehermoso (La Gomera). The rest of the top ten warmest places were Rincón de la Victoria (Málaga), El Ejido (Almería), Cartagena (Murcia), San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria), and Torre-Pacheco (Murcia).
If we ignore the questionable cold temperature from Tenerife, the coldest places in Spain were found in Lleida, Granada, Huesca, Cantabria, and Salamanca. Temperatures there ranged from -2.1 to -6.7 degrees Celsius, showing how much the cold weather affected those areas.