Editor in chief at IamExpat Media
The summer weather in Germany often comes as a disappointment to new arrivals, but this year the sun has been working its socks off. According to new data from the German Weather Service (DWD), summer 2022 was one of the hottest, driest and sunniest on record. To the experts, this is an undeniable result of climate change - and cause for concern.
“It was the sunniest summer [seen] since we started recording sunshine hours in 1951,” Andreas Friedrich of the DWD said at the press conference in Offenbach. Overall, meteorologists measured 817 hours of sunshine during summer 2022, far beating the previous record of 793,3 hours which was set in 2003.
While the sunshine might be welcomed by many, it also comes along with some more worrying statistics: according to preliminary calculations, the DWD expects summer 2022 to be one of the four warmest since records began in 1881 - with an average temperature of 19,2 degrees, 2,9 degrees above the reference period between 1961 and 1990.
On top of that, with just 145 litres of precipitation per square metre, it is the sixth driest summer ever, with 40 percent less precipitation seen than was normal during the reference period.
Before 2022, the warmest summers ever were seen in 2003 (average temperature 19,7 degrees), 2018 (19,3 degrees) and 2019 (19,2 degrees), meaning that three of the hottest summers recorded in Germany were in the last five years. “The fact that we are seeing such records more and more frequently is clearly a result of climate change,” Friedrich said at the press conference.
The lack of rain is already making itself felt in Germany, where drought-stricken crops and forests are coming under increasing stress, and the low water levels in the Rhine River, the country’s major shipping waterway, caused supply bottlenecks as barges were forced to lighten their loads or in places could not even traverse the water.