Last month was officially the hottest June ever recorded, climate experts have confirmed.
Temperatures soared across the world, with Europe seeing the mercury rise to more than 2C above normal.
The so-called “Saharan Bubble” plume of hot air plunged the continent into a five-day heatwave, breaking records in France which saw its hottest ever day on Friday.
This led to the month being around 1C hotter than the previous record set for Europe in 1999, and about 1C higher than expected from the trend in recent decades, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported on Tuesday.
Global-average temperatures were also at an all-time high for the month, beating the previous record set in 2016 by 0.1C.
Three years ago, June was hit by the “El Niño” phenomenon, in which sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean became unusually warm.
C3S, which is tasked with providing comprehensive climate information for the European Union, said it was “difficult to directly attribute this heat wave to climate change”.
However, it added: “Such extreme weather events are expected to become more common as the planet continues to warm under increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.”
The weather monitoring body said that while this year’s European heatwave was “not as persistent as that of summer 2018” – when average temperatures were higher than normal during every month from April to December – it was particularly “intense”.
Temperatures of 6 to 10C above normal hit most of France and Germany, northern Spain, northern Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic over the five-day period, compared to the average for the same five days during 1981-2010.
Jean-Noël Thépaut, Head of C3S, added: “Although local temperatures may have been lower or higher than those forecast, our data show that the temperatures over the southwestern region of Europe during the last week of June were unusually high.
Although this was exceptional, we are likely to see more of these events in the future due to climate change."
The data also showed that the European-average temperature in June was more than 3°C higher than the average for 1850-1900.
