Europe records hottest summer in history

BRUSSELS

This summer has been the hottest in Europe’s documented history with August seeing a record high temperature, the EU’s Earth observation satellite program revealed on Thursday.

“In Europe, the average temperature in August was the highest on record for both the month of August and the summer (June-August) as a whole,” the Copernicus Climate Change Service said in its monthly bulletin.

“The average temperature for Europe from June to August 2022 was about 1.34 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average for the season,” it added.

The temperature outranked by 0.8 degrees Celsius (33.44 degrees Fahrenheit) and 0.4 C (32.72 F) respectively, the records for the summers of 2018 and 2021, known by extreme heat waves.

On the global scale, the past month has been the warmest, exceeding by 0.3 C (32.54 F) the 1991-2020 average of the month.

In August, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre forecast 15% lower yield averages in corn, maize, and soybean as “Europe experiences the worst drought in 500 years.”