Lithuania’s climate is warming despite increasingly unstable weather

Lithuania’s climate continues to warm even as weather patterns become more unstable, climate change researcher Silvestras Dikčius told LRT television’s Savaitė programme. He said this summer was close to the 1991–2020 average temperature, but was the country’s wettest since 2011.

Although the summer felt cool and rainy, Dikčius said it reflected the warmer climate compared with the climate norm used at the end of the 20th century. A summer like this would previously have been considered typical, but is now occurring in a warmer overall climate.

He said the past decade had brought highly varied summers, ranging from particularly rainy and cool periods to hot seasons. The clearest trend, he said, was continuing and increasing instability alongside a general rise in temperatures.

“The overall background is warming,” Dikčius said. “In the warming process, however, there is constant fluctuation.” He said it was impossible to reliably predict what the next summer or the one after it would be like, although two wet and cool summers in succession could statistically be followed by a very different season.

Dikčius said weather forecasts were reliable for identifying trends up to about a week or 10 days ahead. Beyond that, small gaps in knowledge about atmospheric conditions can grow into major errors, producing a completely different forecast of the atmosphere.

He said weather forecasters now collect far more atmospheric data than in the past through satellites, ocean monitoring systems, observation points and meteorological balloons. However, the data are still insufficient to create a fully accurate picture of the atmosphere in computer models.

September has also remained relatively warm in recent years. Two years ago, the month was exceptionally warm, with summer-like conditions lasting for almost the entire month. Last year, September was also considerably warmer than normal, and this year has so far not been cold, with temperatures around 18 degrees Celsius. Forecasts for at least the following week indicated that temperatures would remain fairly warm, although record heat was not expected.