Europe could face weeks of 40°C heat in current worst-case scenario
A perfect storm of conditions priming the atmosphere for extreme heat could result in devastating droughts and deadly temperatures lasting for weeks across Europe
By Madeleine Cuff
8 August 2025
Volunteers work to extinguish a wildfire near the town of Stamata, Greece, in 2024
Nick Paleologos/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In today’s climate, Europe could be hit with a summer of rolling heatwaves and severe drought that would leave much of the continent suffering weeks of deadly temperatures, water shortages and energy price spikes.
That is the finding of new research that seeks to define the “worst-case scenario” for heat and drought possible now during the summer months in central and western Europe.
Read more
The ocean is losing its ability to store heat as the planet warms up
Laura Suarez-Gutierrez at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and her colleagues started with seven simulations of heatwaves in climate models. They then deliberately made tiny tweaks to the starting atmospheric state in the models and re-ran them 1000 times for each simulation to assess alternative outcomes, such as the heatwaves becoming more severe, a technique known as ensemble boosting.
“They generate lots of events with a very, very tiny change in the initial state of the model each time,” says Vikki Thompson at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who wasn’t involved in the research. “These worst cases that they’re presenting are things that this model suggests could happen right now.”
In many cases, no heatwave emerged from the simulations, but in some cases the simulations produced heatwaves and droughts far more severe than anything seen previously in the historical record.
