Heat killed 5,234 people in Spain alone this summer, according to official figures, while the national weather services of the United Kingdom and Austria both reported their hottest summers on record.
Spain's Carlos III Health Institute said heat-related deaths reached 5,234 between May 15 and the present, Reuters reported on the 1st.
August alone accounted for 2,149 deaths. The season's toll already exceeds the previous highs since the statistics began in 2015 — 4,789 deaths in 2022 and 3,035 the following year. The deadliest heat year on record was 2003, when an estimated 13,000 people died.
European countries have issued a series of assessments describing this summer, which ended on the 31st of last month under the meteorological calendar, as unusually hot and dry.
The U.K. Met Office said on the 1st that the average temperature this summer was provisionally 16.5 degrees Celsius, surpassing last year's 16.1 degrees to become the hottest summer since records began in 1884. The previous third-hottest years were 2018, 2006 and 2003, each with an average temperature of 15.7 degrees. Mark McCarthy, who leads climate analysis at the Met Office, said climate change has made a summer like this one 130 times more likely. "Without the influence of greenhouse gas emissions, such a summer would have occurred less than once in 1,000 years, but in the current climate it is a level that could occur roughly once every nine years," he said.
Austria's weather service said the average temperature this summer was 2.6 degrees above the 1991-2020 average and 4.4 degrees above the 1961-1990 average, while rainfall fell by about a third from normal levels. The agency said it ranked first by an overwhelming margin on nearly every indicator, including maximum temperature, the number of heat wave days and the number of tropical nights, adding that it was difficult to find an adequate adjective to describe it.
Germany's weather service provisionally reported an average temperature of 19.6 degrees this summer, the second-hottest on record after 19.7 degrees in 2003. That is 3.3 degrees above the 1961-1990 average, with an average of 22 days reaching maximum temperatures of 30 degrees or higher and five days at 35 degrees or higher.
Parts of southern Europe are expected to remain hot into September. According to weather forecasting platform WFY24, maximum temperatures in the first week of September are projected to reach 35 degrees in Rome, 34 degrees in Athens and 33 degrees in Madrid — roughly 6 to 8 degrees above normal.
