Europe had hottest year on record in 2019, report shows.

Findings confirm 11 of the 12 warmest years in Europe occurred in past two decades.

Europe had its hottest year on record last year, new data has confirmed, with periods of exceptional heat last February, June and July, and one of the wettest Novembers on record.

Previous records were broken by only a small margin, but the findings confirmed that 11 out of the 12 warmest years in Europe have occurred in the past two decades, according to the European State of the Climate 2019 report, published on Wednesday.

There was drought in central Europe over the summer, but at the end of 2019 four times the normal amount of rain fell in western and southern Europe.

A heatwave in Greenland last year brought record levels of surface melting, the report found, though the European Arctic was slightly colder across the year than in some other recent years, with the lowest average since 2010. Europe’s glaciers have lost an average of 16 tonnes of fresh water per square metre since 1997.

Summer temperatures in parts of Europe were as much as 3C to 4C higher than normal in 2019, the report said, with heatwaves in June and July breaking records in France and Germany.

The data confirms other findings that show a clearly warming trend globally. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) also produced its final report for 2019, confirming that last year was globally the second hottest on record, with the oceans reaching the highest temperatures ever recorded.

22 April 2020

The Guardian