ATHENS – The winter of 2019-2020 was warm for most of Greece, based on data collected by the automatic meteorological stations of the Athens National Observatory. Despite being warmer than average, the rise in temperatures did not match that seen in other European countries which, according to the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, experienced the warmest winter in the last 165 years, with temperatures 3.5 degrees warmer than the average winter temperature of the period 1981-2010.

Of a total of 16 selected stations in Greece, 11 of them showed positive deviations and only five presented negative deviations in comparison with the previous decade. The year’s “champion” for a warm winter was the northeastern city of Orestiada, where the average temperature was 1.2 C higher than the average temperature in the period 2010-2019.

Increases of up to 1 degree were observed in the average temperatures of Alexandroupolis, Kilkis, Limnos, Volos and Thessaloniki while smaller increases between 0.2 and 0.6C were seen in Preveza and Ioannina, Florina, Sparti and the island of Tinos.

On the other hand, slight decreases between -0.1 and -0.4C were recorded in five stations in southern Greece – on Crete, in the town of Livadia and in Athens – where the average temperature was 10.9 C, down from 11.3 C in the period 2010-2019 (-0.4).