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According to forecasts, the summer of 2024 should be a “hellish summer”. But June is more wet than hot. Will summer weather come to Germany in July?
Munich – The phrase “hellish summer” probably only makes very few people look forward to the “hot season”. A few weeks ago, weather models predicted exactly that for the upcoming summer of 2024. One expert even predicted that Germany would face a “hellish summer of the millennium”.
The fact that summer feelings have not really been felt so far is less due to unbearable heat than to a heavy rain drought. The first summer month of June was more wet than hot, bringing three large storm cells and a lot of precipitation to Germany. And the DFB team’s round of 16 match was also forced to be interrupted due to the weather.
June was marked by a lot of rain: “Where is that hellish summer?”
In the spring, both the European and American weather models had predicted a hot summer in 2024 for Germany. Biologist Mark Benecke relied on the “experiences of recent years” and said with “almost complete certainty” that an extreme summer was imminent, the likes of which had never been seen before. This was based on temperature records from recent decades, which showed a significant increase in summer temperatures in 2023 compared to previous years.
The latest records show that June was actually slightly warmer than the reference period, as wetter.net reported. This year’s summer month was 0.4 degrees above the average June weather from 1991 to 2020. If you go back even further, it was even 1.4 degrees above the average temperatures measured previously. Nevertheless, a real summer feeling has hardly been felt in Germany recently.
“Where is the hellish summer?” asked the presenter of wetter.netKathy Schrey – and rightly so. “There won’t be any hot temperatures in the next few days,” she continued with the weather forecast for the first week of July and believes that a “major embarrassment of the weather models” is likely.
The weather in the first days of July: cool air from the northeast instead of summer heat
Nobody with common sense is likely to long for the absurdly hot “hellish summer of the millennium”. Sad and worrying records from Brazil show how dangerous extreme heat waves can be. However, Germany may have had enough of the rain. But according to the German Weather Service (DWD), it will probably be with us for a while yet.
“The air has cooled down considerably over the Atlantic,” explained the expert from wetter.netSchrey. The result: cooling and predominantly cloudy skies over Germany. In the coming days, one should not expect a “T-shirt morning,” she warns, and recommends that anyone who leaves the house early should take a jacket with them when temperatures are at most 7 to 12 degrees.
However, the weather is expected to bring a small consolation for the weekend. On Friday (5 July) temperatures are expected to wetter.net to 26 degrees, and even 30 degrees on Saturday (July 6). But the hot air also meets moisture – which encourages thunderstorms. A look ahead to mid-July shows that “new rain clouds keep coming into the country via the northerly flow,” says Schrey. And they have “a lot of moisture in store.”
Is the “hellish summer” forecast an embarrassment for the weather models?
According to information from long-term models, the “hellish summer” is not expected until August 2024. So were the experts and weather services way off with their forecast? Theoretically, the hot summer could still come. Also because predictions cannot be made with 100 percent certainty. After seven days at the latest, we therefore speak of trends rather than forecasts.
The problem with weather forecasts is a data gap. As the German Radio reported, the DWD processes huge amounts of data with its supercomputer in Offenbach. However, not all of the data required to map global weather events is available. Jonas Späth from the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich explained to the radio station: “The weather is calculated on a network that covers the entire earth. Everything that is smaller and falls through this network is only partially represented in the weather model.”
Smaller, incorrectly calculated weather conditions could therefore lead to larger ones – and distort the forecast. After all, in 90 percent of cases, you can trust the forecast weather. The DWD is a little more cautious, however, and writes on its website: “It is in the nature of weather forecasting that it is rarely exactly right.” The reasons for this are highly and almost chaotic, non-linear processes in the atmosphere. The further in the future the forecast lies, the more uncertain it is – which does not completely rule out a “hellish summer” for this year.
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