The temperature of the sea off Malaga has just recorded its lowest-ever temperature for August.

The monitoring buoy at the city’s main port recorded a water temperature of just 15.6C, breaking the previous August low of 16.3C set on August 3, 2014.

The extraordinary reading comes barely a week after the same waters reached 28.8C on August 18, which was just 0.3C below the record high registered in 2015.

It means bathers on the Costa del Sol have experienced a swing of more than 13C in the space of little over a week.

According to experts, the dramatic change is simply due to the wind.

Francisco Franco, director of the University of Malaga’s Chair of Coastal Sciences of the Costa del Sol, explained that sea temperatures along the Malaga coastline are heavily influenced by whether the prevailing wind is the easterly levante or westerly poniente.

Prolonged levante winds push and accumulate the upper layer of seawater against the coast.

Because this surface water is directly heated by the sun, sustained easterly winds can cause temperatures close to shore to rise dramatically.

However, the poniente has effectively the opposite effect.

Westerly winds push the warm surface layer away from the coastline, allowing much colder water from deeper layers of the Mediterranean to rise and replace it, a phenomenon known as upwelling.

After around five consecutive days of poniente, Franco said Malaga’s sea can fall to ‘winter values’.

That is precisely what has happened this week, resulting in the remarkable 15.6C reading.

Does it have anything to do with climate change?

Despite the dramatic swing, Franco stressed that such short-term fluctuations should not be confused with the longer-term effects of global warming.

He said these individual temperature changes have ‘nothing to do with global warming’, which is instead observed through long-term annual averages showing the progressive warming of the world’s oceans.

Read more Andalucia news at the Spanish Eye.