Aerial view of people cooling off at a lake in Haltern am See, western Germany, on 26 June 2019. Temperatures in Gemany reached as high as 38.6°C that day, setting a new all-time German heat record for June that had stood since 1947. That record was beaten again on Sunday, 30 June 2019, with a 39.6°C reading at river Saale. Photo: Ina Fassbender / AFP / Getty Images
Aerial view of people cooling off at a lake in Haltern am See, western Germany, on 26 June 2019. Temperatures in Gemany reached as high as 38.6°C that day, setting a new all-time German heat record for June that had stood since 1947. That record was beaten again on Sunday, 30 June 2019, with a 39.6°C reading at river Saale. Photo: Ina Fassbender / AFP / Getty Images

By Dr. Jeff Masters
1 July 2019

(Weather Underground) – More than 30 locations in Central Europe—including towns and cities in Denmark, France, Germany, and Poland—set all-time heat records on Sunday as the continent’s historic June heat wave of 2019 shifted eastward. Three nations set all-time heat records for the month of June on Sunday: Germany, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein. The heat wave is easing on Monday, thankfully, as a cold front moves eastward over Central Europe.

In a separate heat wave, Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history for the Caribbean nation of Cuba, which recorded an all-time heat mark of 39.1°C (102.4°F) at Veguitas. Thanks go to weather records experts Jérôme Reynaud for this information.

In Germany alone, there were 34 all-time heat records on Sunday, and at least 243 stations saw their hottest June temperature on record, according to statistics compiled by German meteorologist Michael Theusner. Many of the June records in Germany were broken by impressive margins of 1.5–2.5°C (2.7–4.5°F), which testifies to the exceptional nature of the heat (as already noted in France, where more than a dozen stations on Friday broke that nation’s previous all-time high).

At the river Saale in Bernburg, Germany, a scorching high of 39.6°C (103.3°F) on Sunday was not only that station’s hottest temperature on any date in records going back to 1898, but the hottest temperature ever observed anywhere in Germany during any June. According to Theusner, the station’s previous all-time record was set just a year ago—with 39.5°C on July 31, 2018—and its previous June record was set just last Wednesday, with 36.5°C. […]

The role of climate change in Europe’s epic heat wave of 2019

“For all practical purposes, the heat wave is caused by human-made global warming,” Columbia University’s Jim Hansen told CBS News in an interview last week. Hansen gained fame more than 30 years ago, in the parched U.S. summer of 1988, when he testified before Congress that the world was seeing the first signs of climate change due to human-produced greenhouse gases. One of Hansen’s strongest statements at the time: ”It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

In his CBS interview, Hansen said that the odds of a heat wave as intense as this past week’s in Europe would be extremely remote without the contribution of heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuels. [more]

European Heat Wave Shifts East; All-Time Heat Records Tumble in Germany