Western Europe experienced hottest June and July on record
Kenneth Fox
Western Europe experienced its hottest June and July on record.
The EU's monitor says climate change has fuelled a summer of scorching heatwaves, prompting droughts and wildfires in some parts.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service says the combined average temperature across Western Europe over the past two months was 21 .62 degrees, beating the record set in 2022.
It notes particularly dry conditions were recorded in July, including in France, Spain and Ireland - with soil moisture levels significantly lower than in 2022, when Western Europe experienced its last severe drought.
The world's oceans also hit record-high temperatures for a second straight month in July, which Copernicus says was driven by marine heatwaves around Europe and a very large El Nino, a cyclical phenomenon which raises temperatures in the Pacific and is expected to peak towards the end of the year.
The Climate Change Service said that in the second half of the month, an intense heatwave hit much of Europe, resulting in western Europe’s hottest June.
The heatwave also led England and France to experience their warmest June on record, while the UK as a whole, Germany and the Netherlands recorded their second-warmest June, with some locations seeing all-time temperature records broken.
Western Europe saw an average surface air temperature over land of 20.74 degrees, 3 degrees above the 1991–2020 average for June as the heatwave contributed to heat-related deaths and other severe health impacts.
Coming only a few weeks after a severe heatwave in May, the latest bout of extreme heat illustrates the growing challenge posed by increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves – not just in Europe, but in multiple regions globally.
Europe as a whole experienced its second-highest average surface air temperature for the month, at 19.14 degrees.
While consistent with the strong warming trend seen across the region for the month since the 1980s, this warming has become particularly pronounced in recent years – eight of the nine warmest Junes for Europe have occurred since 2019.
Globally, the average surface air temperature for the month was 16.54 degrees, 1.39 degrees hotter than the estimated 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline, making it the second-warmest June on record globally. It was just 0.12 degrees cooler than the hottest June, which occurred in 2024.
