Summer of 2024 in Europe is expected to be one of the hottest on record in recent years, according to a forecast by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
The extreme temperature forecast for summer is calculated to be nearly +2.5 degrees Celsius higher than the climate value for the period 1993-2016.
It should be noted that this was also the first time that none of the available forecast scenarios in May show any negative temperature anomalies for the whole of Europe.
The chart below shows past forecasts for each month of May from 2017 to the present for the summer months (June-July-August) with the gray bars showing the uncertainty in the price deviations from the 1993-2016 climatological value (already a very warm period), and the gray circles show the extreme predictive values of all available scenarios.
The red “X” dots show the actual temperatures observed after the end of the forecast periods and it noted that the warmest summer was recorded in 2022, very close to one of the extreme forecast values in May 2022.
In general it can be said that the model of ECMWF has so far predicted very accurately the general temperature course in Europe in summer, and slightly underestimates the actual values.
For 2024, the blue bar on the right of the graph shows that one of the warmest summers in recent years is predicted, with 17% of scenarios showing extremely high values, and the average close to +0.6 °C above the climate value , the highest predictive value so far.
The most extreme value of predictive deviation is close to +2.5 ºC.
In fact, it is the first time that none of the available forecast scenarios this May show negative temperature deviations for the whole of Europe.
The hottest summer in recent years was in 2022 and was very close to one of the extreme forecast values of May 2022.
