Drought summer 2018 heatwave Germany: Summer 2018 marks the turning point at which Germany realised climate change had arrived. From April to October a drought dragged on that no longer broke isolated records but pushed entire federal states into water stress at scale. Farmers faced crop losses of 30 to 50 percent, the federal government approved billions of euros in emergency aid. River shipping on the Rhine and Elbe temporarily ground to a halt as water levels fell too low. In September less than ten millimetres of rain fell in some regions across the entire month.
In Berlin the average daily maximum temperature in July 2018 ran at 28.2 degrees Celsius, sunshine duration at 330 hours around 40 percent above the long-term mean. The precipitation total for July was only 8 millimetres, against a normal value of around 60. That corresponds to roughly 13 percent of usual rainfall, a record low. Across the whole April to October 2018 period, Brandenburg received around 40 percent less precipitation than the long-term mean.
Comparing 2018 with the great summer of 1976, the parallels are striking. Both summers were shaped by persistent high-pressure patterns, both showed months-long drought, both peaked not in single days but in duration. The difference: 1976 was an isolated event in a cooler climate epoch. 2018 was part of a series. 2019, 2020 and 2022 followed with similar patterns, if not the same intensity. What was a once-in-a-century summer became a once-in-a-decade summer, what was an extreme became a trend.
The consequences for German ecosystems were visible. Mixed forests in Brandenburg and Saxony lost up to 30 percent of their spruce stands to bark beetle infestation, which the drought-stressed trees could no longer fend off. River fish died in the Elbe and Rhine from oxygen depletion at water temperatures above 25 degrees. A large share of German farmland still showed soil moisture deficits in 2019 and 2020 that traced directly back to 2018. Drought is not a weather event but a systems event, with consequences that persist for years.
Meteorologically 2018 was textbook. A stable Azores high shifted unusually far north and blocked Atlantic lows for weeks. Northern and Central Europe experienced a subtropical-feeling summer while the British Isles likewise reported heat records. The jet stream weakness that favours such blocking patterns is described in many climate models as a consequence of accelerated Arctic warming, in which the temperature gradient between pole and equator narrows and the westerlies meander rather than blowing steadily.
The comparison below shows Berlin in July 2018 against July 2025. The temperature and sunshine values are comparable, a hint that what looked like an extreme in 2018 already fits within the normal range in 2025. Our extreme weather series also documents summer 1976 (/en/blog/summer-1976-weather-data) and summer 2003 (/en/blog/summer-2003-heatwave) for historical context. For your own Berlin comparisons see /en/compare/berlin, for Munich /en/compare/muenchen.