The first heat wave of the year starts in Bavaria.
How long it lasts, where it comes from - and why June was actually much too warm beforehand, explains DWD meteorologist Guido-Peter Wolz.
Munich - it's nice too.
Finally summer weather * in Bavaria.
Even the cool Tegernsee is slowly advancing towards the swimming lake with a water temperature of just over 19 degrees on Wednesday.
But for many, especially in the cities and lower regions of Bavaria, the heat wave that started on Wednesday in the Free State is also a torture. Older and weakened people in particular should not handle the temperatures lightly in the coming days.
Reason for us to pester the Munich meteorologist Guido-Peter Wolz from the German Weather Service with the most pressing questions on the subject.
Heat wave in Bavaria: how bad will it get and how long will it last?
Let's start with a snapshot.
The temperatures in Bavaria are currently just about 30 degrees.
This will be exceeded in many places in the course of the afternoon, if only just barely.
It gets hottest in Lower Franconia.
And how does it continue?
“The heat wave will definitely last until Sunday,” says Wolz.
And the next few days it looks a lot hotter.
The current DWD forecast programs for Thursday and Friday spew out peak values of 35, maybe even 36 degrees.
"These will be the hottest days."
Heat wave in Bavaria: why suddenly so hot and dry?
On the one hand we have the high "Zoe", which is pulling straight across northern Germany towards Poland and which also brings dry high-pressure weather to Bavaria.
On the other side there is a low pressure channel over Western Europe.
In between there is a corridor that flushes hot and dry Saharan air into Bavaria.
Wolz: "High pressure * in connection with southwest wind usually cause heat waves in summer."
Heat wave in Bavaria: weather at the weekend more changeable - but still hot
At the weekend, more and more moist and cooler sea air pushes further and further into Bavaria.
From Friday evening onwards, the risk of thunderstorms increases with the increasing humidity *, but it is still low.
On Saturday there is a higher risk of thunderstorms * with heavy rain, some of which are stormy.
“Preferably towards the Alps and in the west.” Nevertheless, it remains consistently hot and also gets really humid.
Of course, it only cools down a little locally where thunderstorms form.
Heat wave in Bavaria ends Tuesday at the latest
The thunderstorm low pressure weather * then continues to prevail at the start of the week.
Wolz: "By Tuesday at the latest we will be back in the normal summer weather." That means: "Between 22 and 27 degrees."
Storm and heat wave in June in Bavaria - is that still normal?
Now, as is well known, “normal” is not an easy term in times of climate change. Many will still remember last week's storm series. To many this will not have seemed normal. Wolz: "The changeable, cooler summer is actually the normal summer in Bavaria." The accumulation of storms may have been a little unusual, but from a meteorologist's point of view it was not normal compared to the current climate reference period (1961 to 1990) were the temperatures. Wolz: "June is already way too warm."
Including Tuesday, the temperatures in June are already 2.5 degrees above average - and the current heat wave is not even included in the calculation.
Wolz: "Everyone can work out for themselves how much this value will rise over the next few days." After May was "too cold" for the first time in decades, we are already chasing new heat records in Bavaria in June.
According to Wolz, the heat wave itself with its southwest weather is not unusual in summer.
“It will be exciting to see how short the intervals between heat waves will be and how much hotter they will be.”
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