A brutal new wave of extreme heat has swept across Central Europe this week, pushing temperature gauges past historic milestones in Slovakia and Austria and marking yet another alarming milestone in the region’s accelerating climate shift. On Wednesday, both nations recorded the highest daily temperatures ever documented on their territory, capping a summer defined by repeated, unprecedented heat extremes.
Slovakia’s new national high comes as the third time the country has broken its all-time heat record in just one summer. Data released by the Slovak Meteorological Institute confirms that the southern town of Kamenica nad Hronom hit 41.4 degrees Celsius (106.5 degrees Fahrenheit) during the latest heat surge, shattering previous marks set only weeks earlier. Prior to this week, the nation’s record stood at 41.3 C (106.3 F), also set in Kamenica nad Hronom on June 30, which itself broke a 41.0 C (105.8 F) record set the day before in Turna nad Bodvou. That back-to-back-to-back record-breaking streak has even toppled a long-standing 2007 high of 40.3 C (104.5 F) set in Hurbanovo, which stood as the national benchmark for 16 years before this summer’s relentless heat.
The extreme conditions are not limited to daytime temperatures. Overnight temperatures between Tuesday and Wednesday also hit a historic peak, with the southwestern town of Skalica recording a low of 28.4 C (83 F) — the warmest night ever recorded in Slovakia.
Neighboring Austria followed suit, breaking its own all-time heat record just one day after the previous milestone was set. Austria’s GeoSphere meteorological service confirmed that a reading of 41.2 C (106.1 F) was recorded in Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, a town located right on Austria’s border with Slovakia. That reading beat the previous national record of 41.0 C (105.8 F), which was set just 24 hours earlier. The news comes weeks after the Czech Republic and Hungary, two other Central European neighbors, also notched their own all-time national heat records earlier this hot season.
The string of simultaneous broken heat records across Central Europe aligns with a broader pattern of extreme climate across the entire continent this year. Europe is currently experiencing an exceptionally hot, dry summer that has turned vast stretches of forest and rural land into tinderboxes, sparking unprecedented wildfire seasons that have forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their homes and popular tourist vacation spots.
Data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirms that Europe is warming faster than any other continent on Earth. Since the 1980s, the continent’s average temperature has increased at twice the rate of the global average, a trend that scientists link to human-caused climate change and that has made extreme heat events far more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting across the region.