2024 was Europe’s warmest year on record - brought unprecedented glacial melting and extreme weather
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The year 2024 was officially the warmest on record in Europe, as reported by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the EU's climate monitoring agency, Copernicus.
Scandinavian glaciers melted at record speed, losing an average of 1.8 meters in thickness—the most significant annual loss ever recorded in Sweden, Norway, and globally, alongside Svalbard.
Elsewhere in Europe, the year brought stark contrasts. Record heatwaves and drought plagued the east, while the west faced deadly storms and flooding, including catastrophic events in Valencia, Spain, which claimed over 220 lives.
Over 400,000 Europeans were impacted by severe weather events.
Europe's warming trend has advanced at twice the global rate since the 1980s, making it the fastest-warming continent on the planet.
- Copernicus Reports: You can find the Global Climate Highlights 2024 and the European State of the Climate 2024 on the Copernicus website.
- WMO Reports: The State of the Global Climate 2024 and its updates are available on the WMO website.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons License.
Chart showing changes in global average surface temperature annually during the month of October
- Uploader's note: Tentatively, uploader envisions this chart as being specific to the time period ending in 2023, designed for use mainly in articles about 2023 in particular. Please don't update this chart with future years' data, at least without discussion. You can upload a separate file for your other purposes.
- Source data: Copernicus: October 2023 - Exceptional temperature anomalies; 2023 virtually certain to be warmest year on record. climate.Copernicus.eu. The Copernicus Programme (8 November 2023). Archived from the original on 8 November 2023. "Globally averaged surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1991–2020 for each October from 1940 to 2023. Data Source: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF."
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(downloaded data file should be: era5_monthly_series_anomaly_all_2t_global_1940-2023.csv )
- For graphical simplicity, uploader changed the "floor" from which the bars extend upward to be from "-1.0" rather than upward and downward from "0.0". Data itself has not been changed.
- Technical note: most SVG code was automatically generated by the "Vertical bar charts" spreadsheet linked at User:RCraig09/Excel to XML for SVG. Minor additions and adjustments were made in a text editor.