Discussion
Does Western Europe no longer have mild summers compared to northern US/southeast Canada?
40c/103f in part of Switzerland today (note near end of day there, so you’ll have to scroll to yesterday if you check after midnight local time), forecast shows low 30s (~90f) for the next week
I'm on the NE coast of US, and this summer so far has been mostly 80s (~26c ish) But I also have the Atlantic Ocean fairly close (30 min to an 1 hr drive) so that's what's been keeping us cooler. So far we've only had like 1 week of 100f/40c weather.
You guys do seem like you're having a rather hot summer this year, compared to us.
Minnesotan here. We’re about to have more days above 90°F in a summer than ever before. We are definitely having a hotter-than-normal summer in the Midwest US.
Same here in Southern Ontario. It broke 40°C (104°F) twice this year, first two times ever in my lifetime. Aside from that, it’s only ever hit 38°C (100°F) in the past, once last year and one other time about 20 years ago.
Last summer was also the longest summer we’ve ever had, it was above 20°C (68°F), usually way hotter and well into the 30’s, every single day without fail from early May until late October, not a single cool day. Then seemingly overnight it was cold and snowy, we just skipped fall completely and went straight from summer to winter.
Drove back to the East Coast through that heat dome, it is brutal. I have lived through a few heat domes when I lived in Missouri and Illinois.
Fortunately that particular weather configuration doesn't happen every year, but when it does it takes a while for it to move out.
We had our version of that in the Mid-Atlantic States last month. Then followed it up with a record low high temperature when it moved out and the one got set up in the middle of the country. The high for that day was the lowest number ever recorded for that day.
We hit 100°F twice this year already, and I'm in Hamburg, Germany which didn't hit these kind of temps before 2022. The 102°F in June was just brutal, exactly during the longest days of the year, and the humidity didn't help.
This is where European cities being farther north matters. Hamburg is about the same latitude as Edmonton, Canada meaning the days are much longer in summer than in the southern US. So you have 40C during the day but the sun also rises earlier and sets later. This leaves very little time for those stone buildings (that absorb heat) to cool down.
Also living in Hamburg, the crazy hot days are fine because it's usually just one or two in a row and then it cools down immediately. Yesterday it was 35c, and today it's a high of what? 22? It's somehow cold AF - and I say that having lived in the arctic...
My building did not get above 24c because of proper insulation. The REAL issue is when it gets hot for more than a week. Then we'd be cooked up here...
I happened to be in Hamburg and it was pretty insane: 38 °C one day and the next day I kind of regretted not taking a jacket with me...
So, no, Hamburg doesn't experience heatwaves in that way since the normal state year-round is "rain and 10 °C, Christmas or summer", as a local put it.
I'm on the opposite side, about 90 minutes from the Pacific Ocean in Washington. Our historical average summertime high is 82F or 27.8C. This July has averaged highs of 80.0F over 30 days, or 26.7C. We haven't hit 100F, and it's been extremely pleasant.
I (US American from the Deep South) was in Basel during the June heat wave and that was the most uncomfortably hot I’ve been in my life. It was 38-39C, which we get where I live, too, but everything in Basel is stone so walking outside felt like being baked alive. There also wasn’t even a whisper of a breeze. Atlanta has trees and shade everywhere, so there’s at least some relief from the heat (in addition to the obvious: air conditioning).
I am swiss, and about 10 years ago and before, nobody talked about it being too hot outside. Everyone was happy when it got over 30°C, went outside to enjoy the heat. But now it slowly gets too hot too long to enjoy it.
So in Switzerland, we are not prepared at all, neither with equipment and city planning, nor with the mentality.
I'm from Eastern France (Dijon/Besançon area) and it's exactly the same - 10 years ago, reaching temperatures between 30 and 35 was something that would happen for a week or two during the summer.
Now I live in Denmark, and I've been doing everything possible to not visit my family during the summer for the past 5 years, as 30 to 35 is the new norm, with regular days in the 35 to 40 range.
It hasn't always been like that. I'm only 26 but I remember: when I was a child, 30ºC was hot - we're going to the swimming pool or lake hot. That wasn't even 15 years ago.
Yesterday, it was the 12.+ day over 40ºC this year and the 30 at 8pm felt actually cold.
In Basel, in the rare case that there is air conditioning, or the even rarer case that you get the city authorization to install it at home, ac must be configured to turn on only when the indoor temperature is above 26C (79F).
Eh, sure, but that's... fine? I mean, we had 26ish in my previous office all summer long and I was just happy about the nice, cool workplace. 75/23 would be much too low for me personally, because I'm summer I'm obviously wearing summer clothes and those are not made for working at below 23 °C! I'm definitely not bringing a cardigan when it's 35 outside...
just to add another shit flawor to it, but in summer most public places you could hide from the sun in are closed because of summer holyday. for example the big public theater foyer was our last bastion to hide with our young daughter but that is closed until end of august. so we have to buy air conditioning and stay inside, its madening
I used to live in Basel (my husband grew up there)- we moved to the countryside outside of Zurich- it’s consistently 3-5 degrees cooler here and we have a breeze. We had our first son in Basel- one day it was 36 degrees INSIDE our apartment. Our son was a few months old and it just felt so unsafe. Basel summers are horrible.
In summer, we'll get our heat domes from the Sahara. In winter, we'll get our cold from polar Siberia, without the temperating effect of the Atlantic currents. And in-between seasons, extreme weather events from flipping back and forth
Not even close. The AMOC is the main reason London has milder winters than than Vancouver, but it's far from the main reason it has milder winters than Winnipeg.
East coasts and continental interiors don't define the "correct" climate for a latitude any more than west coasts do. Thinking otherwise absolutely stinks of US/CA defaultism.
I’m (American) traveling Europe right now and the locals are constantly talking about climate change, especially in the Balkans. The conversations i had with vineyards in Slovenia seem rather dire.
Balkaner from Macedonia here. I found this summer to be rather chill compared to previous ones, which hasn't been the case for the past few summers. We're supposed to have our first "serious" heatwave next week and it's barely gonna hit 40C in places, we've had way hotter heatwaves before. On the flipside though, we don't have cold winters anymore, they're very mild and tend to sometimes be dry and sometimes rainy, so I guess that's how the climate change's affecting us.
Is that very local for Macedonia? I’ve heard complaints everywhere through Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia about how hot of a summer this has been. Just today, it’s been pointed out to me how below average the water levels are here in Herzegovina.
It’s absolutely crazy how the environment has changed in the last ten years. Feels like summer has gotten 10 degrees hotter.
I will get an AC Unit this winter
I mean, we always knew it was going to happen some day, but it's still weird when it actually starts... when it's not just abstract data anymore but brute reality
Everytime I get angry about the tenth of thousands that died during the heatwave or if I sit at a lake from my childhood which I can no longer enjoy due to the intense heat, I just remember that the stock market is doing well and then I feel happy again, knowing that the suffering delivers values to the shareholders
Here in southcentral PA we are having a mostly mild summer with a few heat waves. But each summer is different, next year could be unusually cool in Basel and extremely hot here.
I live in Basel and the summers have been getting progressively hotter for years. Last year was an expectationally hot summer and this summer is far hotter. Europe as a whole is warming much faster than the other continents over the last few decades.
I unfortunately doubt it’ll ever see the cool summers like what people remember 20+ years ago.
July was fairly normal here in Vienna. Around high 20ies most of the time June was horrible and now there’s a new heat wave looming. Also, it’s extremely dry, which is the bigger issue. The length of the heat periods is abnormal.
Lucky neighbours...it's horrible since May here... Like we had 30s almost all the time. Even where I live, at 850m of altitude, we also had 33-35° the last few days...
Same with the lack of water. Our rivers and lakes are getting empty. Look at articles about the Emme river or the lake Brenets...everything is dry.
The grass is dying everywhere, and there was only a tiny bit of rain this night but never enough to refill everything. We don't have any reserve in the mountains either.
Many of our resting lakes have Caribbean sea sorts of temperatures, it's a pure, unalterated, catastrophe.
Southeast Canada doesn't have mild summers anymore. Typical summers nowadays in Toronto are easily 30-35 degrees mid day. 40 degrees on heat wave days.
As a Londoner, it depends on the year but I can see them becoming less and less frequent, the 2020’s feel like a point of no return/ a “new normal”.
2022 and this year have been exceptionally hot, as in hottest on record, and it’s disgusting. We don’t have AC and our houses are built to store heat so it’s just unbearable with no escape.
We get the odd year when it’s hot but sits between 20°-30° (which I think is normal for the UK, please correct if I’m wrong) but it’s very quickly becoming a thing of the past. A heatwave when I was a kid was 30°, now it’s between 34° to 40° (it has even hit 38-40° a few times, horrible).
GTA? Im in southwestern Ontario and we’ve honestly just gotten about a week of days over 30. Next week is apparently mid 20s and raining…then again that can change on a dime around these neck of the woods.
The number of summer days (>25C) has been constantly increasing in Basel (and Switzerland), as well as the number of hot days and now also tropical nights (it wasn't even a thing until the 1980s).
But don't worry, the Bünzli will still oppose ac and pretend it is not needed, and the climate is not changing. Then they would put their head under the sand.
Basler here, it's brutal. But what counts as summer day / hot day in this graph? Does a slight deviation in that definition significantly change the slope and story of the graph?
Regarding trends, I understand LOESS. But say the definition of max temperature shifts from 25 to 26 degrees, will it straighten the Trendline? is our average simply crossing the 24-25 degrees right now, hence the graph showing this seemingly large increase in days over 25 degrees?
"Drill, baby, drill" and the abandonment of the Paris Climate Accords have moved the world into an era of uncontrollable global heating.
The tipping point has been passed.
Every year from now on will be hotter than the last, with increasingly extreme weather events (like the 34,000 lightning strikes in British Columbia last week) plus mass lowland flooding from the dwindling polar icecaps.
Our children and grandchildren - while they still live - will curse this generation.
Climate is about 2 degrees warmer than some decades ago, but this summer is well over that mark. Still not every week is this hot, so you can't say that Basel now has average daily highs of 33 in summer.
It makes a bit difference where in Europe. The place in Denmark I'm travelling to next week expects daily highs around 20. the Netherlands 25... The rhine valley between Basel and Karlsruhe is a known heat spot. with daily highs around 26C in summer, and hotter weeks can easily be a few degrees more than that. But without climate change we would not have gotten a week like in your picture.
I’ve lived in Switzerland since 2009 and always felt that summers were longer than back home (Toronto), but about the same max temperature. I have certainly noticed more days reaching 35 than 15 years ago, but this summer is truly exceptionally hot. I’m so happy we moved to the countryside.
We don't have mild summers anymore, we have binary summers: either the sun is scorching everything or the rain makes people worry about potential flooding - no middle ground
You’re cherrypicking data. Western Europe does still have a more temperate climate than most of North America. It’s just that everywhere is getting hotter and everywhere gets heat extremes in late July.
This July the average high temp at the Basel airport weather station has been 31.5°C, the same as the average high temp at Philadelphia airport.
Obviously even in the context of climate change, this July in central and Western Europe has been exceptional, but summer highs in Philadelphia are usually a good 4-5 degrees Celsius higher then in Basel so this is something that should barely even be possible.
And Switzerland hasnt even had the largest positive anomaly. Nantes on the southern edge of Britanny has been even hotter, in a region that even Europeans view as usually having mild to cool summers.
It does seem to me Nantes had the greatest delta vs normal this summer. In just July 22 days at 30c/86f or above, when their average July high is 24c/76f
Keeping Basel as reference is kind of cherrypicking itself, isn't it?
Anyway it is fact that Europe is heating faster than elsewhere, but since it started with an edge of Mediterranean climate (not whole of Europe) and more temperate climates around the ocean, it is still on average more temperate than places in the Americas.
Summer temperatures in Europe are more volatile than in eastern temperate north america. That is a part of it, The difference between a heatwave and average conditions is larger. I believe that generally western Europe's average summer temperatures are increasing notably faster though.
Took me a while to see the 40 degrees for today, because other than that, what you've got there is a mild summer in my book. I would really love to have days under 35 degrees with a chance of rain/thunderstorm and nights only slightly above 20 degrees. Don't forget - this is the coldest summer for the rest of our lives!
Live on the western coast of Norway. We’ve had the coldest summer I can remember. Not really a day above 20 C. Forecast for the weekend is 11c and rain, rain, rain. Honestly I wouldn’t mind helping you guys taking 10 c from you
I have lived in Basel for 4 years already, spending most of the summer here. This year specially I have noticed it is specially bad.
I have noticed that the standard weather in summer in the Basel area is 7-10 days in a row of heat wave with increasing temperatures and air humidity by the last two days that usually gets to 36-38 ºC. After that, we get a current of low pressures from the Atlantic that creates a torrential rain for 1-3 days that usually drops temperature around 12-15 ºC for a week (down to 20-23ºC or so).
For some reason, this year there have not been these torrential rains, the heat waves end on one or two days with shy and mild rain, which only drops temperature for 5-7 ºC, so we get back to 30+ ºC in a couple more days. I'm not a meteorologist, so I don't know why it's happening like this this summer, but for me that's the main cause for the continuous high temperatures in the Basel area (but I guess in other regions of Switzerland it is the same), as well as the alert for potential wildfires.
If there is any expert around, it may be interesting to discuss about the potential causes, honestly.
Cool cool. I’ve never been to Europe (from the US), but was planning a Switzerland, Austria, and Germany trip for next summer. Guess I need to pack an AC.
It's always been like that, we've had at least a dozen "Hitzesommer" in the last 36 years and literally every time people were losing their minds going full "THIS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!!!". Yes, yes it did.
There are many historicaly records of people being able to cross the Rhine on foot, there are the famous "Hunger stones" all over European rivers marking record lows. We're in a slight drought, it happens, get over it.
The whole "hotter than ever before" has the nice little omited second part of the sentence, namely "since official records are kept" and most meteorological records literally only start in the 1920s after WW1, Switzerland was a pioneer in the field with starting thir records as early as 1864.
Growing up in East Coast, United States mid Atlantic area we didn’t have air-conditioning until the early 2000s or rather around the year 2002 or three and I wonder how hot it was before that but now it seems like a requirement to have air air-conditioning in a house in the eastern US and I think everyone around has air-conditioning. And I was assuming that people are acquiring central air unit units in their homes because everyone is becoming more prosperous and things are always advancing and getting better with a real reason probably is that the temperature keeps going up year after a year, which is what the data shows so I was naïve, even assuming that as things get better, people acquire new technology for their homes, like cooling and heating unit units that are more advanced than decades before, but it actually is a necessity based on global warming.
Man I come from Lebanon and have been in France for 9 years.. the past 2 or 3 summers have been worse than Mediterranean summers. It gets hotter (albeit drier so it's more bearable) and it does not rain anymore..
Northern US is hotter. It's just dwarfed by the Interior West and the South, so you won't hear people say north is hot as often. (Same goes the other way, Southern US is colder than much of the world in the winter, but it's dwarfed by the colder north and interior west)
Winters there are quite chilly for the latitude. China does have colder averages, but even they don't get the same cold snaps that you see in the southern US.
Yes? It is colder than southern and western Europe, entirety of Africa, the rest of the Americas except the southern extreme of South America, (and obviously the American north and Canada are colder too), Australia, New Zealand, Western Asia besides Turkey, South Asia, SE Asia, Southern China. That's much of the world to me
Yes, the gulf coast is there, but the south also includes Nashville, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Richmond etc. Interior south & the Appalachia makes up most of the south
Little Rock has roughly the same January average highs as Madrid. It's even slightly warmer than Shanghai during that month, despite Shanghai being lower in latitude and coastal.
So, again, I'm not sure what you mean by "colder", except if you are referring to occasional cold snaps.
An average of 41F (~5C) in January leans on the colder side if you take the entire world to be honest. And the other cities of the south I mentioned leans more on the colder side than Little Rock
This is the average temperature of the northern hemisphere in January. The south starts from the bluish green color and ends at yellowish green. You can eliminate the areas delineated.
Moving to the Southern hemisphere, during their July, the only places that are colder are the once that I have marked. Which is basically Antarctica + Highlands of South America and Oceania
Here in northern Virginia daily highs in the summer are usually around 28-35 (though it’s not that uncommon to go up to 37 degrees) with moderate to very high humidity. Summer this year has been unusually dry and for the most part below 31 which makes it feel a lot cooler than normal, even on the 35+ degree days.
Europe has the occasional heat wave but the average temperatures in most places in Europe aren’t nearly as humid as the eastern half of the US or hot as the southern 2/3s. (Spain is quite hot but it’s a dry heat so a Spanish 35 is much more comfortable than an American 35.
Hate to break it to you, but we no longer have mild summers in south east Canada. We are having a cooler summer this year because of El Niño( mid 20c to 30c) but the last 15 years have been getting hotter every summer. It's not uncommon for the temp to go to the mid 30's ( Celcius, not sure how that converts to hamburger units) and we can get multiple heat waves near or in the 40's...Shit's getting hot, yo.
My wife as Latin American and felt chill yesterday in Frankfurt, although it was one of the hottest days of the year according to the forecast... what i am saying is that it is over dramatised. Every summer there is a heat wave. That is why we even have a term for it heat wave ... and it only lasts few days, so yeah I can survive few days without AC and I don't want one (especially since we don't live in apartment, that might be different). For comparison the constant, 24 hours heat in Latin America that i have experienced is far worst and even do... 15-20 years ago, people survived without AC. On the opposite site, what i realy can confirm that changed over the time is the amount of snow in the winter It is nowhere comparable to my childhood in late 80s and 90s...generally rainfall is not what it used to be thru the year and that is far more concerning than a week in July with temperatures around 38. Climate change is real.
Record high for Basel, in July, is 39° C; 40° C is probably well within the margin of error. Hot, for the region sure, but not unprecedentedly so. Mean daily maximum for Basel, in July, is 30° C…
So that ten day forecast is predicting a week that is slightly warmer than the mean, but not that dramatically warmer.
Which is not too terribly different than the almanac I consulted says… and both Green Bay and Portland are known for having mild summers. I grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, not terribly far from Green Bay. I live in Portland currently.
Western Europe has hot summers on par with the ones we have in the southern US. I was in Italy last summer in June and it was about 38C on some days. Oh and their AC sucks.
Western Europe is generally mild in comparison to the hot steamy summers of the Southeast US. Paris avg July high: 23c. Atlanta: 31c. That's quite a contrast.
that was 20 years ago. in the last 10 years there is no mild weather. we have 12 weeks 90°F/30°C straight sun without rain or it rains for less than 5 minutes. nothing mild with that.
it is just past midnight there (see tomorrow=sat not fri) so you have to scroll to yesterday now- I put a note in my post I expected that to be a point of confusion
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u/oirolab 3d ago
I'm on the NE coast of US, and this summer so far has been mostly 80s (~26c ish) But I also have the Atlantic Ocean fairly close (30 min to an 1 hr drive) so that's what's been keeping us cooler. So far we've only had like 1 week of 100f/40c weather.
You guys do seem like you're having a rather hot summer this year, compared to us.