climate.you · Case study

Europe's summer of heat and drought

Much of the northern hemisphere was hot this summer. Almost all of it still got its normal rain. Western Europe did not, and went on to set national wildfire records in Spain and France. A look into the Copernicus ERA5/ERA5T record.

Published 25 September 2026

Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026 · ERA5/ERA5T 2 m air temperature and total precipitation · record through 31 August 2026 · processed with the open-source pipeline powering climate.you

Heat

0°C+5°C above normal

Rain

0%200% of normal

Two views of the same 76 days. Heat: mean air temperature from 1 June to 15 August against the 1991–2020 average for those dates. Rain: rainfall over the same window as a percentage of the 1991–2020 normal.

More than 1.2 million acres burned across Europe this summer.^[1] Spain lost the largest single fire in its recorded history, near Ávila.^[2] More land burned in France than in any year since national records began.^[2] Across the two countries, more than 300,000 people were told to leave their homes.^[1]

It was a hot summer, but not only here. Counting heat episodes as runs of days well above what is normal for the date in that country, Russia spent 40 days in one, Canada 36, China 29, Japan 30. Heat alone was not unusual this year.

What set western Europe apart was that the rain did not come with it.

54days in heat episodes in France, May to August

13 Augthe day the August heat peaked in the UK, France and Spain together

Hottest & driestFrance’s summer was both, out of the 48 summers since 1979

45%of normal rainfall in Portugal, 1 June – 15 August, the driest of the eight European countries measured here

63days in heat episodes in Italy, May to August, the most of any country measured

2.4×Europe’s warming rate against the globe since 1979

Heat, nearly everywhere

Summer 2026 did not arrive as a single heatwave. It came in episodes of different lengths, in different places, and they overlapped. France was in one for sixteen days from 13 June; for the week of 18 to 24 June it was joined by Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, all five in an episode at the same time. That June spell is the subject of our previous case study, which follows the heat dome as it tracked north-east across the continent.

The August episode was the United Kingdom’s sharpest. On 13 August the Met Office recorded 38.1 °C at Kew Gardens, the fifth-hottest day in the UK record, and the second day of 2026 to reach 38 °C.^[3] Only 2022, the hottest year the UK has had, has managed two such days. Three days in 2026 reached 37 °C.

In our own gridded figures it was the hottest day of the year for the UK, at 27.4 °C averaged across the whole country by land area. France and Spain were in the same episode and close to their own August peaks, 35.6 °C and 35.1 °C, though neither beat its June and July highs.

When each country was in a heat episode

Three or more consecutive days above its own local 90th percentile, May to August 2026

western Europerest of the northern hemisphere

Each bar is three or more consecutive days above that country’s own 1991–2020 90th percentile of daily maximum temperature for the date, on its area-weighted national average. The blue band is the late-August rain.

This chart uses daily maximum temperature. Every national weather service defines a heatwave differently. The Met Office uses fixed county thresholds; Météo-France requires a daytime maximum and a night-time minimum to be passed together for three days and nights, on thresholds set per département.^[4] The episodes here are not any one country’s official heatwaves, and are not comparable to their published counts.

The rain that never came

Heat on its own is survivable. What turns a hot summer into a burning one is what the heat arrives on: soil that has already given up its moisture, rivers running low, vegetation that has been drying since spring. So the second question is how much rain fell while all this was happening.

In western Europe, not much. From 1 June to 15 August, Portugal, Spain and France each received about half the rain they would normally expect, and Germany was not far behind. Italy and the United Kingdom finished the window nearer normal, though that total hides a savage July in Britain.

But the rain did not stop everywhere at once. In Iberia it was already failing in June. In Britain, June was wetter than normal, at 119%, and the drought only began in July, when barely a third of the usual rain arrived.

When the rain failed, country by country

Rainfall as a percentage of the 1991–2020 normal for each period

Brown = drier than normal, blue = wetter. Iberia was already failing in June; Britain’s drought did not begin until July.

The same measure across the northern hemisphere

Rainfall 1 June – 15 August 2026 as a percentage of the 1991–2020 normal, over land

0%200% of normal

Land only, across the northern hemisphere, where it was summer. Rain over the ocean is not part of this story and is much noisier than rain over land, so the sea is left out. Nationally the big countries came out close to normal: the United States 101%, China 102%, Canada 99%, Russia 99%. Two other brown patches are worth naming. Southern Pakistan is a real and severe failure of the monsoon, worse in places than anything in Europe: around Sukkur the window brought 1 mm against a normal of 68. California is the opposite case, an artefact of the ratio: its summers are normally almost rainless, so 1 mm against a normal of 7 reads as a deep deficit on a map while meaning very little on the ground. The grey gaps, most of the Sahara and the Arabian peninsula, are drier still and are left out entirely.

Heat on dry ground

The two halves of the story have been told separately so far: how hot each country was, then how dry. Neither on its own picks western Europe out. Plenty of the northern hemisphere was as hot; a handful of places were as dry. What follows puts both measurements on the same chart, one country per dot, to show which of them had to take the two together.

Heat and rain together, one dot per country

Both measured over the same dates, 1 June to 15 August 2026

western Europerest of the northern hemisphere

The shaded corner is more than four weeks in heat episodes on less than 80% of normal rain. Only Spain, France and Italy are in it. Russia was in heat episodes almost as long and still finished on 99% of its normal rain; Canada, China and Japan sit on or above the 100% line.

The dry corner is not an abstraction. The countries that landed in it are the ones where the summer ended in evacuations and burnt ground, and the ones just outside it came through without a national record to show for the heat.

Country	Rainfall	Heat days*	Outcome
Spain	50%	31	Largest fire in its recorded history
France	53%	43	Most land burned in a year on record
Italy	70%	47	Longest in heat episodes, but no fire record
Portugal	45%	10	Driest of the eight, and no fire record
Greece	113%	5	Wetter than normal, and no fire record

* Days in heat episodes between 1 June and 15 August, the same window as the rainfall column.

Over those same eleven weeks Russia spent 37 days in heat episodes, almost as many as France, and still finished on 99% of its normal rain. Canada, China and Japan were all hot and all wet. Italy was in heat episodes longest of all, 47 days, but at 70% it was wetter than Spain or France, and it did not set the records they did.

Heat was common this summer. Heat arriving on ground that had not been rained on was not.

The break, mid-August

Around the 16th of August the weather pattern broke and the Atlantic rain belt, which had been steered around western Europe for most of the summer, moved back over it. In the fortnight that followed, Portugal received 37 mm, 482% of normal for those two weeks, and 1.9 times everything it had received in the preceding 76 days.

Elsewhere the return was real but ordinary: Spain 127% of normal for the fortnight, Italy 127%, Germany 128%, France 112%, the United Kingdom 113%. Not a deluge: just a normal fortnight, arriving after the fires were out.

How far behind normal the rain fell

Cumulative rainfall since 1 June 2026, against the 1991–2020 normal for the same dates

2026 1991–2020 normal

The solid line is this year; the dashed line of the same colour is what that country would normally have accumulated by the same date. France never stops receiving rain, so its solid line keeps climbing; the point is how far below its own dashed line it stays.

Your summer

Every number so far is a national average. Click your own location for the temperature and the rainfall where you live, day by day, from June to the end of August.

Drag the slider to step through the whole summer in five-day windows, 1 June to 31 August. Each is measured against that month’s own average, which is why Spain looks most extreme in late June rather than in July: its hottest absolute day came on 6 July, but July is normally hot in Spain, so the same heat is a smaller departure from normal. Click anywhere for that place’s daily record. Values are for the 0.25° grid cell around the point, not a weather station. The two rain windows are the dry stretch and the fortnight it broke. The window you pick is marked on the matching chart when you click a place.

Has this happened before?

A hot, dry summer is not in itself remarkable; western Europe has had plenty. The question is whether this particular combination, at this size, has a precedent in the record. The chart below plots one dot per June–August since 1979, temperature against rainfall, with 2026 highlighted. If earlier summers were routinely hotter and drier, they would sit above and to the left of it.

The heat, on its own, is not what separates these countries. In 5 of the 8 (France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) no summer since 1979 has been hotter than 2026. What varies is the rain. Switch country and watch the dot move sideways.

France: every summer since 1979, heat against rain

One dot per June–August, with 2026 highlighted. The shaded corner is hotter and drier than 2026.

France 2026: no summer in the record has been hotter, and none has been drier, out of 48. It finished +3.16 °C against the 1991–2020 average on 62% of its normal rain.

For France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands the corner is empty: nothing in the record was both hotter and drier. What separates them is how close the rest of the record comes. France stands alone in having no summer that beat it on either measure, hotter or drier. Spain has two drier, Italy five, the Netherlands seven, the United Kingdom ten.

The United Kingdom is the case that shows heat is not the whole story. It had its hottest summer in 48 years and it did burn: EFFIS counted about 23,400 hectares across 72 fires larger than 30 hectares by 10 August.^[5] But that is roughly half the area lost in 2025, which remains the UK’s worst year in the EFFIS record at 47,900 hectares. Ten of its 48 summers were drier than 2026. Heat without the same depth of drought produced a bad fire year, not a record one.

Two break the pattern on the dry axis. Portugal finished its summer wetter than normal (113%) once the late-August rain is counted, and Greece, though it had one of its warmer summers, was wetter than most of the record. Neither was among the countries named in the season’s fire reporting, which centred on Spain, France and Italy.^[1]

It is not that heat is new, or that dry summers are new. It is that across western Europe they have not arrived together at this size before: not in France, not in Spain, and not in a United Kingdom that has just had its hottest summer of the 48 on record.

Every day of 2026 against every day of the baseline

Daily maximum temperature, area-weighted over the country, March to the end of August

One grey line per year, 1991–2020, so the grey band is the range the date has run in over thirty years. Red is 2026. Where red sits above the band, that day was hotter than the same date in any of those thirty years.

The long view

None of this happened to a stable climate. Europe has warmed by 0.50 °C per decade since 1979. Against the whole planet, land and ocean together, that is 2.4 times the global rate; against the world’s land alone, which warms faster than the sea, 1.5 times. Put as a temperature rather than a rate, Europe’s last five years averaged 1.6 °C warmer than its 1979–2000 average.

Europe is warming faster than any other continent

Warming rate in °C per decade, 1979–2025, from the annual mean 2 m air temperature

Least-squares trend on the annual mean. Global aggregates are shown faint.

Warming does not decide what any one summer does, but it sets the ground the weather arrives on. That is the summer this page has measured. Heat almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere, and rain nearly everywhere it was expected, except across a band of western Europe where the two failed to arrive together. Whether 2026 reads as an outlier or as an early draft of an ordinary summer is not something the record can answer yet. It can only say that nothing in the last 48 years looks quite like it.