A weather phenomenon that appears more and more often in Romania. What the seasons of the future look like

The spring a few decades ago began later and were cooler and predictable, but the last years show us that this season is changing, is full of contrasts and passes faster from cold to hot – and vice versa. The spring of the future will mean in Romania and snow on April 10 in the plains, once a few years, as well as “T -shirt” temperatures on March 15, as it was this year.

• The last decade shows us how the spring of the future will be. March brings more and more temperatures over 25 C, in the first part of April they can be nights with winter temperatures, but after the middle of the month there were several times over 30 C. May, generally very unstable, can bring heat waves, but also drought.
• In the spring, phenomena characteristic of the hot season, such as hail or storms appear earlier in the spring. The episodes of extreme rains fall in short intervals are multiplied, as it happened at Stâna de Vale in May 2021, with rainfall of 181 l/sqm in 24 hours.
• Spring is more and more a super-dynamic season, one full of contrasts. The weather passes relatively quickly from cold to hot and vice versa, especially since once in a few years episodes of frost late to the end of April. March has brought summer temperatures in the last two years, and April has brought tropical days in half of the last decade.
• The average of the temperature of the spring season in Romania has been +10.8 C in the last 30 years. If we take the last 125 years, there have been extremely large variations between the coldest spring (average below 7.5 C) and the hottest (12.8 C).

“A very fast dynamic“

The spring of this year shows how capricious this season can be. March has been the hottest month since there is weather data in Romania, with maximums that have passed 28 C and minimum nights that exceeded 10 degrees Celsius. But April brought cold and snow: they were below -8 C in Banat and below -13 C in Transylvania and the snow layer was deposited even in the Danube area.

Then, after April 15, heat came, so the temperatures came to be in Transylvania and 15 degrees Celsius above normal and were days with summer temperatures and at Miercurea Ciuc.

“Spring changes its characteristics. On the one hand, we are dealing with extreme phenomena such as winter phenomena, even in April, but then alternations can come to temperatures such as summer. It is a very fast dynamic, exactly during the transition period,” he explains for HotNews.ro, Mihaela Caian, a senior scientist.

It states that the tendency is that in April, extreme weather phenomena, such as sudden cooling, but ANM manages to better forecast these events due to evolved methods and regional studies for Romania. The most accurate forecasting of these cooling episodes in the middle of spring helps a lot, especially since the field will be strongly affected by climate heating.

Meteorologists' data, according to temperature trends for the last 55 years, indicate a strong increase in average March temperatures in the country, especially in the south, East and South-east, and precipitation indicates a decrease tendency, but in the last decade of April it has been observed an increase in precipitation in the southern areas. Also for the South there is a 10-14-day gap for the rainy spring season, which “moves” from the beginning of April towards the end of the month. It must be said here that it is only a trend for several decades, because the differences from year to year can be extremely large.

And the hail sometimes appears very long in the spring. In March 2025 ANM documented 17 cases, in several regions of the country.

A phenomenon that appears more and more often

A phenomenon that appears more and more refers to late spring frosts, an example of the last decade being a temperature of -0.8 C in Calafat, on April 27, 2016, the latest spring frost in a regular city with high temperatures.

A late winter episode was between April 20 and 22, 2017, when a snow layer was deposited in cities such as Buzau (24 cm), Brașov (15 cm), Galați, Tecuci, Focșani, Bârlad, Râmnicu Sărat and Petrosani. It also snowed in the Danube Delta, but also in Bărăgan and in limited areas of Muntenia. On April 21, 2017, there were 59 cm in Bârnova, not far from Iasi, and the snow layer resisted six days. Also in Bârnova there was a snow layer over half a meter and in April 2023.

And in Bucharest there were very late frosts in recent years: on April 25, 2017 and April 22, 2020. On April 29, 2025 the minimum night at the Baneasa station was 0.0 degrees.

The most recent episode of frost late spring is this week: on April 28, 2025 were -0.8 C in Grivița (not far from Slobozia), in Vaslui were -1.2 C, and in Botosani, -0.5 C. On April 29, he gave the frost at a few plains: -0.5 C to Hârări, and to Hârteni. ANM maps.

“The late spring frosts become more frequent, because changes in the circulation of air masses favor their production more than before. They appeared from time to time, it was something perfectly natural in a stable climate, but we are no longer in a stable climate,” explains Mihaela Caian. She says that the projections show that these late frosts could be more common, but in the future there are no severe intensity events, even in a warmer climate.

One thing should not be forgotten: extreme sporadic events were three – four decades ago, but now the extremes are more common in all seasons.

The drought will be more present in the spring months

The scenarios of the climatologists, based on numerical models that go by 2070, indicate that in a few decades, corn will bloom on average faster than 6-8 days than in the south of the country, due to climatic heating.

• The drought also has a chance to appear more and more in the spring, and the data for the last six decades indicate a strong drought tendency for the southeast of the country in March, while in May, drought trends are especially seen in Dobrogea, Oltenia and in areas of Crișana and Banat. Once a few decades can snow at low altitudes and can be frozen after May 15th.

The last decade clearly shows that it can be spring months with very few rains, as it was April in 2020 and 2018, March in 2022 or May in 2023 and (in some areas of the country) in 2024 (the data are from the climatic characterizations published by the ANM).

An extensive study on the droughts in Romania shows that there were months of spring with severe precipitation: March in 1873 and 1924, April 1908, 1930, 1943, 1959 and 2016) and May (1856, 1918, 1936 and 2020). The drought was most often manifested between June and September.

For farmers it is increasingly difficult to anticipate how spring will be. Sowing is difficult to program, due to temperature oscillations, and fruit trees are vulnerable to late frosts.

Differences “from heaven to earth” between the coldest and hottest spring

The spring of 2024 was the hottest spring in Romania, from the interval 1901-2024, having an average temperature per country of 12.8 ° C. Thus, the previous record was exceeded, respectively the spring of 1934, when the average seasonal temperature in the country had the value of 12.4 ° C, the ANM data shows.

• The coldest spring, in 1987, had an average of below 7.5 C. About spring extreme in Romania you can read here. The average of the temperature for spring over the past 30 years was +10.8 C, while a century ago was on +9.6 C

In Bucharest Filaret, the spring had an average temperature of 10.6 C between 1895 and 1906, with variations between 9.4 and 12.1 C. In 2024, the average of the spring temperature was 14 C in Bucharest, while in 1987 it was below 8.5 C.

The highest absolute spring temperature in Bucharest was +36.6 ºC (in May 1950), and the lowest was -21.7 ºC, in March 2018.

Climatic estimation tells us that there are trends to increase temperature in all seasons, but the “ranking” of heating shows that the summer has been heated, followed by winter, spring and autumn, compared to the reference range 1961-1990.

How every spring month changes

• March It is a very changing month, cold and humid days alternating with hot and sunny. This alternation occurs due to the changes that occur in the circulation of air above Southeast Europe. March has been very hot in the last decade, especially in 2025, 2024 and 2017.
• April It generally brought a much more stable weather than March, the winter episodes are rarer and the temperatures are raised. The fourth month has been full of contrasts in the last decade: in 2024, 2018 and 2016 there were many days with summer temperatures, and in 2021 it was much colder than usual. This year, April started with very cold days, then to move on to much warmer days and to temperatures well above normal.
• May It is the one in which there is an increase in atmospheric instability, against the background of temperature rise. The atmospheric circulation is very dynamic and can be created situations of sudden changes of the time and can be torrential rains. Historical data show that they can appear in the first serious heat waves and there are years in which it can be drought, although the fifth month is one where it generally rains a lot.

What does the seasons of the future look like?

The winters will be getting hotter and with more rains instead of snowfall and there is a statistical tendency of earlier triggering, but in summer it starts earlier and will be longer. Another trend will be the extension of summer in September. Here we are talking about trends, so it will not happen year after year, but we can have a general idea of ​​what we are heading. The summers become more and more difficult to bear in cities, especially because of the tropical nights, and the summer of 2024 will remain in the weather history of Romania.

• In 2024, spring started from February, a month that brought record temperatures and there were places where the average temperature passed 9 C. March was extremely hot, especially towards the end, and April was extremely hot, close to the historical maximums.

A strange spring was in 2018, when March brought frost throughout the country and snowed in Bucharest on March 23. But April was then the hottest in history, and May, the second hottest.

We must not forget one thing that becomes more and more obvious: there can be severe short -term episodes in every season, extreme phenomena exist and, against the background of global warming, are fed with more energy and, consequently, their manifestations are more severe.

It can be drought in May, which is generally wet, can be summer days in the first part of March, as it was in 2025, and can rain as in the summer in April, and in the mountains there are days when the gusts pass 150 km/h.

Nature “wakes up” faster, late frosts become dangerous for trees

Japan is the country where there are the oldest data about the flowering date of some fruit trees, being the famous cherries in Kyoto. Since the year 812 there is data on the moment of flowering, which did not vary for a long time and was somewhere in mid -April, and after 1850 it went to the first days of the month. In Kyoto Media it was April 17 around 1850 and currently reached April 4-5. Being an exceptional hot year, 2021 brought the flowering date to March 27.

In Europe we have nowhere so old historical data about fruit trees, and in Romania, not so, so it is difficult to say how much the flowering date was moved. But we can see in some years with warm spring that flowers appear much faster than in previous years.

There are also in Romania some studies for fruit trees, researches that have shown that, in recent years, developmental stages, such as swelling of buds and flowering, have started earlier than 40-50 years ago, being the risk of exposure to late spring frosts.