Europe is facing a new heatwave, coming after the hottest July ever recorded for 12 million Europeans, with the UK, France and Spain set to be hit hardest.

Western Europe has already endured four heatwave episodes since May, according to the EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service, while national weather agencies are warning of further heatwaves in the coming days.

At the same time, drought is also spreading across the continent. It has hit Spain and France hardest and is now extending into the UK and Germany, fuelling the outbreak and spread of devastating wildfires.

More heatwaves to come

“A new spell of extreme heat is moving north across much of the UK,” the Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, warned yesterday on X.

By Thursday, temperatures are set to climb to 36C in parts of eastern and southeastern England.

In France, a new heatwave episode is expected tomorrow. The heat will spread across many regions, with temperatures reaching 39C, according to the national forecaster Météo-France.

So far this year, temperatures have peaked at 38C above the seasonal average for the 1991 to 2020 reference period. This will be France’s third heatwave of the summer, following episodes in June and July, the latter of which lasted 16 days.

July 2026 was, together with July 2022, the hottest on record in Spain. The average temperature was 25.7C, some 2.6C above normal, according to the Spanish meteorological agency Aemet.

Slovakia recorded an all time high of 42.2C in the south of the country on 6 August, according to the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute (SHMU).

According to GeoSphere Austria, the country’s weather and geophysics agency, a record of 41.2C was recorded on 5 August in Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, in eastern Austria.

Widespread drought

Spain experienced its driest July since records began in 1961, according to Aemet.

Half of England and the whole of Wales have also been affected by drought, while further parts of England are expected to be officially declared in drought today.

England has gone seven consecutive weeks with less than 10 millimetres of rainfall, while some areas in the east and southeast have recorded less than one millimetre, according to the government’s Environment Agency. The Met Office said July was the driest ever recorded in England.

Devastating wildfires

These conditions have fuelled the outbreak and spread of forest fires that have burned vast areas of land and released huge quantities of carbon dioxide, according to Copernicus.

A huge wildfire burned through 42,000 hectares in the Gironde department of southwestern France at the end of July.

At the same time, the largest wildfire in Spain’s modern history burned through 44,000 hectares in the Ávila region of central Spain.

Falling river levels, warming seas

A direct consequence of the high temperatures and drought has been falling water levels in rivers including the Seine, the Danube and the Rhine. The Vistula river in Warsaw was measured at a historic low today.

Around the continent, waters in the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean are experiencing unusually high temperatures, linked to a succession of marine heatwave events.