With August 2024, a new month has been added, not surprisingly, to the series of “warmest in the history of measurements”. In the lowlands of Austria, it was 3.0 degrees above the average for the climate period 1991 to 2020, and in the top areas it was 3.3 degrees, geospheric climatologist Hans Ressl summarized in Monday’s report. August is also the fifteenth month in a row that is above average. The last relatively cool month was May 2023.
August therefore ranked first in the lowlands in the series of warmest August months in the 258-year history of measurements and in the mountains also in the 174-year series of mountain measurements. Compared to the climate period 1961 to 1990, which was not yet so severely affected by global warming, the deviations were even more extreme: 4.8 degrees in the lowlands and 5.1 degrees in the mountains.
First frost-free month in Salzburg
The number of warm days with at least 30 degrees was also extreme and occurred two to three times more often this year than in an average August. No records have been broken so far, only Eisenstadt achieved the same value with 19 warm days as in the record year 1992. There was a record at altitude, because at the Geosphere’s Sonnblick Observatory at over 3,100 meters above sea level in the Hohe Tauern in Salzburg In August, no day was recorded with temperatures below zero degrees – making it the first frost-free month since measurements began in 1886.
Heavy rainfall caused widespread flooding and mudslides
The eighth month of the year was characterised by long dry periods, which were then replaced by some heavy thunderstorms with heavy rainfall, which caused flooding and mudslides in some places. In the Austria-wide analysis, there was 29 percent less precipitation than in the average August. The last time it was this dry this month was in 2019 (minus 25 percent) and in 2015 it was even drier (minus 41 percent).
Due to exceptionally heavy rainfall in the middle of the month, Vienna was the only state with six percent more rain than average in August. The number of hours of sunshine in the Austrian monthly evaluation was ten percent above the long-term average.
Source: Krone
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