Summer 2026 is giving the European continent almost no break. After three heatwaves already recorded since June, weather models are now converging on a new heat episode for the very first days of August, with peaks that could locally reach 40 to 42 degrees Celsius.
The season got off to a rough start. According to Météo-France, the June 2026 heatwave lasted as long as the one from August 2003, long considered the benchmark for such events, but hit with greater intensity. A third wave then struck Spain and Portugal in early July, with temperatures topping 40 degrees and Portugal declaring a heat and wildfire alert. France was hit next, with an episode stretching from July 4 to 19, sixteen straight days of heat, the third longest streak ever recorded in the country, behind 1983 and 2006, but already worse than 2003, 2018 or 2025.
After a brief lull in late July, attention quickly turned to the start of August. Two major weather models, the European and the American, spent days disagreeing on what would come next, torn between the return of a genuine heat dome and a brief heat spike before oceanic air reasserted itself. The latest ensemble forecasts now point toward an intense burst of heat as highly likely across a large part of France, from the southwest to the center east, even if a severe and prolonged heatwave hasn’t yet become the consensus scenario.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to France. According to Euronews, seasonal forecasts across the board agree that August will run hotter than normal across the entire continent, with the strongest signal centered on the Mediterranean and southeastern Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Greece and parts of the Balkans. Several major cities, among them Naples, Barcelona, Rome, Valencia, Nice, Thessaloniki, Split and Athens, aren’t expected to drop below 20 degrees on a single night during the first days of the month, a pattern of nighttime heat that’s particularly hard on health, especially for the most vulnerable.
This pileup of heatwaves is no accident. A CNRS research team estimates that temperatures recorded in Europe this summer would have been two to four degrees lower without human driven climate change. A study published in 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences points in the same direction, showing that the atmospheric patterns responsible for locking in extreme events, both heat domes and floods, have nearly tripled since the 1950s as a result of climate change.
In France and elsewhere across the continent, this latest episode looks set to confirm a deeper trend, heatwaves arriving earlier, hitting harder and coming more often, a climate shift that scientists have been documenting and warning about for years.