Europe will have to brace for summer temperatures of 50C in future, the UK Met Office warned yesterday, a day after Sicily registered blistering heat of 48.8C in what is believed to be a new European record.

The grim warning came as four people died in Italy’s wildfires, firefighters in Greece continued to battle blazes across the country and Algeria announced days of national mourning for its ­dozens of dead.

The 48.8C recorded in the town of Floridia, near Syracuse in eastern Sicily, was a harbinger of things to come, the UK forecast service said.

Exceeding the previous record of 48C in Athens in 1977, it “raises concerns that even higher temperatures are potential in future, possibly even exceeding 50C”, the Met Office said.

“The chances each summer of seeing really extreme temperatures are pretty high now,” said Professor Peter Stott, the Met Office’s leading expert on climate change and an authority on European heatwaves.

“We can’t say exactly when it is likely to happen, but Europe will need to prepare for the eventuality of further records being broken with temperatures above 50C being possible in Europe in future, most likely close to the Mediterranean where the influence of hot air from North Africa is strongest.”

Since the pre-industrial era, the temperature in North Africa has increased by about 2C – far more than the average temperature rise around the world of 1.1C.

After Turkey and Greece experienced exceptionally high temperatures last week, the heat is now building in the central Mediterranean.

The high temperatures are expected to extend into the Iberian peninsula and Morocco in the next couple of days.

Spain may exceed its current temperature record of 47.3C, recorded in Cordoba in 2003.

Both Spain and Portugal were on alert for wildfires as the heatwave moved toward them. In 2017, fires killed ­dozens of people in Portugal.

“It will be next week before temperatures are expected to slowly decrease across the region,” said Chris Almond, a meteorologist working with the UK Met Office’s Global Guidance Unit.

In Italy, firefighters battled hundreds of blazes across the southern regions of Calabria, Sicily, Campania and Sardinia.

The fires have claimed the lives of four people, two of them elderly farmers who were trying to save their property and livestock.

In Floridia, the town where the record temperature of 48.8C was registered, the mayor said it was the culmination of weeks of extreme heat.

“Temperatures have been high since June. On July 29 it was 44C and the day afterwards 47C,” Marco Carianni said.

Italy’s heatwave is expected to peak today, when 15 cities around the country will be on a public health red alert, from Bolzano, Trieste and Brescia in the north to Rome, Palermo, Florence and Bari in the ­centre and south.

“Temperatures this high in summer are not unusual. What is unusual is their duration,” said Antonio Sano, of the weather website ilmeteo.it.

Nello Musumeci, governor of Sicily, said: “I’ve never seen a catastrophe on this scale.”

In Greece, the prime minister said the country was “on the 10th day of an unprecedented natural disaster” as hundreds of firefighters tackled new flare-ups.

Rainfall in some areas and a dip in temperatures gave cautious hope that the worst might be over after the most severe heatwave in 30 years burned more than 100,000 hectares of land, half of it on the island of Evia.

“The climate crisis is here and it shows us that everything needs to change, from the orientation of the economy to national energy policy,” Kyriakos Mitsotakis said.

Algeria has declared three days of national mourning for 69 people who were killed by wildfires this week.  

Meanwhile, torrential rain caused severe flooding and mudslides in northern Turkey, killing at least five people, the country’s disaster and emergency management agency said yesterday. Across the border in Tunisia, the temperature in Tunis hit an all-time record of 49C this week.

In the United States, nearly 200 million Americans are under heat advisories or excessive heat warnings as two “heat domes” hover above the Pacific north-west and the east coast.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]