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. France burned more land than in any year on record, and Spain had its largest single fire. A look into the Copernicus ERA5/ERA5T record.

Published 29 September 2026

Updated 1 October 2026. Country averages now leave out territories far from the mainland, such as French Guiana for France and Alaska for the United States. Some of France’s figures changed as a result; the findings did not.

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 680,000 hectares burned in the EU alone this year, three-quarters of it in Spain, France and Italy.^[1] Spain had 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.^[3]

It was a hot summer, but not only in Europe. Across the northern hemisphere, many countries experienced heat episodes.^[a]

Below, we’ll see that what set western Europe apart was the combination of prolonged heat and the lack of rain from June to mid-August.

51days 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 second driest of the eight European countries measured here, after France

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 a heat episode 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.

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

From 1 June to 15 August, Portugal, Spain and France each received about half the rain they would normally expect, with Germany not far behind.

The rain did not stop everywhere at once though. Portugal and Spain were already dry in June, while the United Kingdom had a wetter than normal June followed by a very dry July.

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

Neither measure alone singles out western Europe: other countries were as hot, and a few were as dry. But when we put the two together on the same graph, a clear picture emerges.

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.

Less land burned across the EU than in 2025, but far more of it was in Spain, France and Italy, and all three sit in the shaded hot and dry corner.^[1]

Country	Rainfall	Heat days*	Outcome
Spain	50%	31	Largest fire in its recorded history
France	44%	40	Most land burned in a year on record
Italy	70%	47	Twice its average area burned, fourth-largest since 2006

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

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.

The break, mid-August

In the second half of August the rain came back. 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, with 10–30% more rain than normal for the fortnight in Spain, Italy, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Not a deluge: just a slightly wetter fortnight.

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?

The chart below plots one dot per June–August since 1979, temperature against rainfall, with 2026 highlighted. In 5 of the 8 countries (France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) no summer since 1979 was hotter than 2026, so what separates them is the rain.

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 +3.51 °C against the 1991–2020 average on 59% of its normal rain.

Of those, only France had no drier summer either. Spain had 2 drier summers, Italy 5, the Netherlands 7 and the United Kingdom 10.

Portugal and Greece were different. Once the late-August rain is counted, both finished June–August with normal rainfall or more. In an average year the two account for 40% of the EU’s burned area. This year both burned less than usual.^[1] Portugal was among the driest of the eight countries until mid-August, but it spent far fewer days in heat episodes than France or Italy.

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

This summer happened in a warming climate. Europe has warmed by 0.50 °C per decade since 1979: 2.4 times the global rate for land and ocean together, and 1.5 times the rate for the world’s land alone. Europe’s last five years averaged 2.4 °C warmer than during pre-industrial times (1850–1900, the baseline the Paris Agreement uses). Europe has already crossed the 1.5 °C threshold by a large margin.^[5]

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.

The next few years will tell us whether the 2026 summer in Europe was exceptional or just the new baseline.