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Unsurprisingly, August 2024 was another month in the “warmest months in recorded history.” It was 3.0 degrees above the average for the 1991 to 2020 climate period in Austria’s lowlands and 3.3 degrees in the summit regions, Geosphere 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 thus ranked first in the series of the warmest August months in the 258-year measurement history in the lowlands and the 174-year mountain measurement series in the mountains. Compared to the climate period 1961-1990, which was not yet so strongly affected by global warming, the deviations were even more extreme at 4.8 degrees in the lowlands and 5.1 degrees in the mountains.
The number of hot days with at least 30 degrees was also extreme, occurring two to three times more frequently this year than in an average August. For now, no records have been broken; only Eisenstadt, with 19 hot days, reached the same value as in the record year 1992. However, there was a record at altitude because at the Sonnblick Observatory of the Geosphere at over 3,100 meters above sea level in the Hohe Tauern in Salzburg, no day with temperatures below zero degrees was recorded this August, making it the first frost-free month since measurements began in 1886.
The eighth month of the year was characterized by long dry spells, only interrupted by some heavy thunderstorms with heavy rainfall, which caused flooding and mudslides in places. The Austria-wide evaluation showed 29 percent less precipitation than in an average August. The last time it was similarly dry this month was in 2019 (minus 25 percent), and even drier was in 2015 (minus 41 percent). Due to an exceptionally heavy rainfall event in the middle of the month, Vienna was the only federal state with six percent more rain than in an average August. The hours of sunshine in the Austria-wide monthly evaluation were ten percent above the long-term average.
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