{"id":515403,"date":"2026-06-24T02:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T02:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/515403\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T02:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T02:46:10","slug":"france-records-hottest-day-ever-as-40-drown-in-heatwave-scorching-across-europe-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/515403\/","title":{"rendered":"France records hottest day ever as 40 drown in heatwave scorching across Europe \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

France<\/a> recorded its hottest day ever on Tuesday amid an exceptional heatwave<\/a>, the national weather agency said.<\/p>\n

M\u00e9t\u00e9o France said the country\u2019s national thermal indicator \u2013 an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations \u2013 hit a new record of 29.8 degrees. The previous record of 29.4 degrees dated back to heatwaves of August 2003 and July 2019.<\/p>\n

Temperature records also tumbled at individual weather stations and on consecutive days in some towns as daytime highs climbed well above 40 degrees.<\/p>\n

The national weather service placed 54 areas of France under a red heatwave alert.<\/p>\n

Forty people have drowned while swimming in unsupervised areas across France<\/a> in recent days, the prime minister has said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a tragic scourge of drownings,\u201d said S\u00e9bastien Lecornu on Tuesday. \u201cThe latest figures we\u2019ve received are 40 deaths since June 18th. Most of the victims are young people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lecornu was preparing to chair a crisis meeting with ministers to address the ferocious early summer heatwave.<\/p>\n

The heat was believed to be linked to the deaths of two young children in their family car on Monday. First responders were unable to resuscitate two children, aged two and four, who were found unconscious \u200cby \u200ctheir mother \u200bin the family car outside their home, said a prosecutor in Carpentras, southeast France.<\/p>\n

The national weather service characterised the heatwave alert as \u201coppressive and exhausting\u201d heat, smothering about half of the country. It said overnight temperatures were the hottest since record-keeping began in 1947.<\/p>\n

\"AA pharmacy sign displays the temperature in Beziers, southern France. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys\/AFP\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

Officials in the greater Paris region advised people to work from home as much as possible and avoid rail journeys. <\/p>\n

M\u00e9t\u00e9o France said the heatwave has reached what it described as a \u201cplateau of severity\u201d, with unrelenting heat, day and night. A growing number of regions will tip into the red again on Wednesday as the heat spreads across more than half of the country, including the northernmost tip of France, said the weather service.<\/p>\n

Human-caused climate change is tied to increasing extreme weather and UN climate agency projections suggest the next five years will shatter more heat records.<\/p>\n

\u201cFurther record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year,\u201d said M\u00e9t\u00e9o France.<\/p>\n

The sweltering temperatures extending across swathes of Europe are caused by what Clair Barnes, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, described as a bulging mass of hot air.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s drawing warm air up from North Africa, from the Sahara, and that\u2019s why we have this really intense heat,\u201d said Barnes. <\/p>\n

In England<\/a>, some schools closed early on Tuesday as Britain braced for the heatwave to set new records. With temperatures expected to rise to 40 degrees, the Met Office issued its second-ever red heat warning. <\/p>\n

UN secretary general Ant\u00f3nio Guterres said in an address to a London Climate Action Week event on Tuesday: \u201cLondon isn\u2019t just calling. It\u2019s cooking.\u201d <\/p>\n

He urged the world to work towards limiting global warming. \u201cA climate crisis is pushing us deeper towards higher temperatures and closer to catastrophic tipping points, and an energy crisis is exposing the folly of a world hooked on hydrocarbons,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

In Italy<\/a>, the health minister declared a red heatwave alert in 15 cities, including Milan and Rome. In Germany<\/a>, officials said swimming accidents had spiked over the weekend, leading to the deaths of five people.<\/p>\n

Nearly all of Spain<\/a> was under a heat alert on Tuesday, with red alerts warning of \u201cextraordinary danger\u201d issued for areas around the southern city of C\u00f3rdoba, the northern city of Bilbao and parts of the northern region of Cantabria.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s national weather service, Aemet, issued red alerts for temperatures of 44 degrees in southern Andaluc\u00eda as well as warnings of 40 degrees in the normally temperate Cantabria and the Basque Country regions along its northern Atlantic coast.<\/p>\n

Aemet meteorologist Rub\u00e9n del Campo said Spain, which has experienced increasingly torrid summers of late, is only going to get hotter because of climate change as heatwaves become more frequent, longer and appear outside the traditional window of July and August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"France recorded its hottest day ever on Tuesday amid an exceptional heatwave, the national weather agency said. M\u00e9t\u00e9o…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1814,42,102,43,2846,40,38,41,39,18335],"class_list":["post-515403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-france","tag-headlines","tag-italy","tag-news","tag-spain","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-weather-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}