After a dry winter, how is Portugal learning to live with drought?

To begin, our regular roundup of the latest data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

February 2022 in Europe was 2.4 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1991 to 2020 average.

The map of temperature anomalies confirms that figure, with Europe and much of Russia shaded in red, indicating warmer than average temperatures.

But it was a quite different story from Alaska to Greenland and right down to Texas in the US, where temperatures were in some cases well below the February average.

In Antarctica, it's the end of summer and the sea ice reached its second-lowest monthly average on record. Around the continent, there were 0.9 million square kilometres less sea ice than average this February.

In Portugal, 95% of the country is now facing a severe or extreme drought due to dry conditions hitting the entire Iberian peninsula this winter.

It means farmers are facing an extremely tough growing year ahead.

So how are they adapting? Euronews travelled to eastern Portugal to meet farmer José Maria Falcāo, who took us on a tour of his farm, called Torre Das Figeuiras.

Our first stop is a bright green field of barley - to the untrained eye, it might look perfectly healthy, but José Maria told us that he can already see that the plants are suffering from a lack of water. The barley should normally be taller, thicker, and have longer roots, but it has been weakened by a lack of rain and is succumbing to fungal infestation:

"This is typical when the plant is weak. When it needs to grow and it's left wanting everything bad happens to it, like a person who is sick and malnourished who gets ill a lot easier," José Maria explained.

You don't need to be an experienced farmer to see that the large irrigation reservoir on his farm is almost empty.