CUP FEVER: A boy heads the ball on graffiti painted in reference to the 2014 World Cup on a street in Sao Paulo. The city will host the opening match of the 2014 World Cup.     Reuters file Photo

By Steff Gaulter


The World Cup starts at the end of this week. Prepare for patriotic flags and dodgy football songs. At least the vuvuzela has been banned!
Those fans, who are actually travelling to the southern hemisphere may be in for a bit of a shock. It’s now June, so summer for the north of the globe, but in the south, it’s winter and in some parts of Brazil, it could well be rather chilly.
One of the first things to remember about Brazil is that the country is huge. It’s a little larger than Australia, and spans 4,395 km (2,730 miles) from north to south. In the north is the vast Amazon rainforest, where the weather is hot and humid throughout the year.
It’s also very wet, with many places seeing over 2,000 mm (80 inches) of rain in a year. This is three times as much as London expects annually, and twice as much as Seattle. The rain is tropical and the temperature barely varies during the year; the maximum temperature hovers between 28°C and 32°C (82°F and 90°F).
However, the climate in southern Brazil is very different. It’s far more dependent on the seasons: in the summer the weather can be unbearably hot, but in the winter it is distinctly cool. In fact, at times winter can feel bitterly cold thanks to icy blasts of air known as friagens, which sweep in from the Antarctic.
These cold snaps are often preceded by torrential downpours. As the rain clears, the friagem can drag the temperatures down further than you might expect. During one of these chilly blasts, frost is not uncommon in the far southern states, even by the coast. It might also surprise you to learn that snow isn’t unheard of. In fact towards the end of July last year, an icy blast delivered snow to dozens of cities in southern Brazil, and the temperature in some locations dropped as low as minus 7°C (19°F). In the city of Curitiba, where some of the matches in the World Cup are being played, the temperature dropped to an icy minus 3°C (27°F).
Already, we’ve seen one of the cold blasts sweep across South America. This was towards the end of May, so wasn’t quite as dramatic a temperature change as it might have been had it been winter. Despite this, the temperature in Porto Alegre dropped to just 6°C (43°F) during the night. As regular readers of The Weather Addict may know, I’m rather sceptical of long range forecasts, but another friagem or two can’t be ruled out during period of the World Cup.
Despite any cold weather in the south, the tropical conditions will continue in the north throughout the tournament. The high humidity and high temperatures can make the climate quite unpleasant.
At this time of year, temperatures in Fortaleza usually climb to 30°C (86°F), while the humidity hovers around ninety percent. With such a dramatic change between the weather in the north of the country and that in the south, the lottery of match locations could well leave some teams at a distinct disadvantage.
It takes six weeks for your body to acclimatise fully to the local conditions, and most professional sports people like to spend at least two weeks adjusting to a new climate. The trouble is, if there are only a few days between matches, two weeks of acclimatisation is simply impossible.
Travelling from a hot climate to a cold climate should not lead to too many major problems, as long as the players warm up properly. There is a greater risk of athletes suffering from cramps if the muscles haven’t been properly stretched, but more problems will arise after arriving in a hot climate from a cold one.
One of the major risks of exercise in a hot climate that you are not used to is dehydration. Your body will sweat more in the heat and athletes have to be careful to replace all their liquid and salts.
There is also an increased demand for blood flow to muscles, which are producing heat. This overtakes the need for blood flow to the skin, which is necessary to transport heat away from the body, and as a result, body temperature rises.
The only way to get over this is to exercise in the new climate, and this will be impossible if a team has had a previous fixture in the south. Croatia, for example, play their first match on 12 June in the southern city of Sao Paulo, before heading north to play in tropical Manaus just six days later.
Foreign media, particularly the British press, have spent a lot of time criticising Qatar for even daring to bid for the 2022 World Cup. This is likely to be moved to winter, but even if it were summer and all the games were played in air conditioning, at least there would be a level playing field; everyone would be enduring the same conditions.
In Brazil, one end of that “playing field” seems to be particularly hot and humid.  It will be interesting to see how that affects the players.