It’s so hot that women in bikinis are sunbathing in Moscow.
A heat wave across much of Europe also is causing crops to wither, forest fires to ignite and roads to melt, while refrigerators and fans are buckling in the searing sun.
From Russia’s Urals mountains to western Germany, a week of temperatures hovering stubbornly in the mid-30s has baked northern parts of Europe, which are usually spared the heat of the Mediterranean — and forecasters are warning of more to come over the next week.
People were finding ways to beat the heat. There was the rare sight of women in bikinis sunbathing on Thursday in Kolomenskoye park in Moscow, while other people tried to cool off by soaking themselves in fountains and playing in water jets in the Russian capital, Belarus and other parts of Europe.
It hasn’t been all fun and games though. The air-conditioning systems on board the high-speed trains of Germany’s national rail operator Deutsche Bahn broke down several times. With locked windows, dozens of passengers were afflicted with heat exhaustion after spending hours trapped in temperatures of up to 50°C.
The higher temperatures are being caused by an interaction between a zone of low pressure to the northwest of the UK and high pressure around the Mediterranean, British weather service spokesman Barry Gromett said.
“What that does is to bring hot African air up over Europe,” he said. “Temperatures are, in many places across Central and Eastern European, about five to 10 degrees warmer than you might expect.”
A batch of cooler air is scheduled to work its way slowly across France and into central Germany, Gromett said.
However, heat waves may be here to stay.
US climate scientists said on Thursday that last month was a record-setting month in the temperature department, keeping the planet on a course for a hot year.
Worldwide, the average temperature last month was 16.2°C — 0.68°C warmer than average for the month of June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington said. This year has had the warmest average temperature for the January-June period on record — 12.2°C.
Russia’s worst droughts in a century have destroyed almost 10 million hectares of crops in central and European areas, authorities said. A state of emergency has been declared in 18 Russian provinces, where fire has engulfed more than 26,000 hectares of forest.
The situation has been described as serious by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who oversees the agriculture sector.
However, he said authorities have the resources to cope. Various officials have tried to reassure the public that the country has enough grain stockpiled to rule out imports.
Germany’s potato industry union, meanwhile, says it expects losses of 30 percent in this year’s harvest.
“The situation is worse in many places this year than in the drought years of 2003 and 2006,” said Martin Umhau, the head of Germany’s Union of Potato Industry.
The Chamber of Agriculture of the Czech Republic estimates the grain harvest could by down by 10 percent compared with last year.
Meanwhile, drowning deaths were up in Eastern Europe as people flocked to seas, lakes and rivers in search of a break from the blistering heat. More than 230 people died in the last week alone across Russia, with 21 perishing over two weeks in Latvia, according to officials, who lamented the tendency of heavy drinking while sunbathing. Last year, about 3,000 people drowned in Russia.
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