Europe's Heat Pushes East as Germany Sets a 41.3 C Record
A record-breaking heat dome that has killed dozens in Western Europe is sliding east, with Germany and Poland bracing for the weekend peak.
Germany recorded its hottest temperature ever measured on Friday, a preliminary 41.3 C (106 F) near Saarbrucken, as the heat dome that has punished Western Europe for a week began sliding east toward Poland.
The reading, still provisional, edged past the 41.2 C the country set in July 2019, Germany's national weather service said. Britain, France and Switzerland have all logged record June temperatures this week, and the heaviest human toll has been in France, where deaths have been reported among both the elderly and the young.
Forecasters expect the peak this weekend. The heatwave is going to peak at the weekend, well over 40C in some parts of Germany,
said Karsten Brandt, a meteorologist at the forecasting site Donnerwetter.de. Models point to 42 to 43 C across eastern Germany and western Poland on Sunday before thunderstorms break the spell.
The driver is an Omega block, a kink in the jet stream shaped like the Greek letter that parks a dome of hot air over a region and holds it there while cooler, wetter weather slides around the edges. It is why the same cities have baked for days rather than hours, and why the relief, when it comes, arrives as storms rather than a gentle cool-down.
The strain is showing in timetables and start lines. Germany's national rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, is letting passengers cancel long-distance bookings free of charge into early next week, warning that sun-buckled tracks, stressed overhead wires and the risk of wildfires and thunderstorms threaten its network. Organisers of Sunday's Ironman European Championship in Frankfurt shortened the bike and run legs. Across the continent this week the heat has knocked out power and, in France, driven a spike in drownings on the hottest night on record.
The everyday response says something about how unprepared the region is. Demand for electric fans has surged, and Asian air-conditioning makers report a boom in European sales, even though most of northern Europe's housing was designed to trap warmth, not shed it. Cultural sites have closed, farms have suffered, and some hospitals have struggled to cope as the heat stretches into a second week.
The World Meteorological Organization expects the dome to drift toward central Europe and the Balkans by the end of the month, which makes the records set this week less a finale than a handoff. Northern Europe's housing stock was built to hold heat in, not keep it out, and a continent that once filed 40 C under Mediterranean problems is now rewriting its June record books most summers. The thermometers will fall this weekend. The trend underneath them will not.
