Brazil has 100 consecutive dry days in the year, an increase of 25% – 09/30/2024 – Daily Life

Brazil had an average of 100 consecutive dry days per year from 2011 to 2020. That’s 20 more dry days compared to the period from 1961 to 1990, which represents an increase of 25%.

This is what a study by Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) shows, carried out at the request of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, released at the beginning of this month. For the purposes of the study, a dry day is considered to be any 24-hour period with precipitation below 1mm of rain.

The research used data from 11,473 rain gauges spread across the country to calculate rainfall volumes and dry periods over the decades. In addition, it also used temperature information collected by 1,252 meteorological stations.

With this, Inpe carried out analyzes of maximum temperatures, heat waves and precipitation rates in Brazil. The results show that the increase in drought was accompanied by other changes that made the climate more extreme in the country.

The number of days per year with heat waves, for example, went from 7 to 52 in three decades. Maximum temperatures have increased by up to 3°C in 60 years. The South region had a 30% increase in average annual precipitation.

Both the data on consecutive dry days and the maximum precipitation in five days serve to determine the occurrence of climate extremes, which increased during the studied period.

Dry periods were longer in the Center-West, Northeast and part of the Southeast — especially the north of Minas Gerais — in the past decade, the study shows. Some of these areas averaged 80 consecutive days without rain in the 1960s.

The emission of greenhouse gases explains the longer dry periods, according to a note published by Inpe. Researcher Lincoln Alves, responsible for the research, stated that the increase was already expected, according to projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a body created within the scope of the UN (United Nations) to provide scientific information on climate change in the world.

“The scenario reiterates the need to accelerate climate action, with scaled measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change”, says the Inpe note about the study. “For Alves, Brazil, being a tropical country with strategic sectors, such as agriculture and energy, with high dependence on the climate, urgently needs to invest in solutions such as water capture and storage, the adoption of crops that are more resistant to drought and heat, and the promotion of sustainable technologies for irrigation.”

The researcher also spoke about the need to reforest degraded ecosystems. “Observation of the last six decades of data, which were collected by the National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet), allowed us to recognize how much the climate has already changed”, says the institute.

Fires were faster than help

As shown by Sheetthe 13 bulletins released since the end of June by the Ministry of the Environment on the fire crisis show that the escalation of fires in the Pantanal, Amazon and Cerrado occurred at a speed much higher than the increase in firefighting carried out by the federal, state and municipalities.

According to the documents, from July until now the accumulated area burned in the Pantanal has tripled in size, reaching 2 million hectares — 13.4% of the biome.

In the Amazon, the burned area more than doubled this September — 11.7 million hectares, or 2.8% of the biome. The cerrado has already had 12.3 million hectares burned in 2024, which represents 6.2% of its total area, with an increase of almost 40% in the last 15 days alone.

The Lula government cut 18% of resources allocated to the energy transition, according to a report by Inesc (Institute of Socioeconomic Studies).