World records warmest August ever, says European climate agency

3 min readBengaluruUpdated: Sep 10, 2026 02:40 PM IST

A man walks along the railing of a bridge before diving in the Limmat river during a heatwave in Zurich, Switzerland. (AP Photo)

The world has just experienced its warmest August ever. The global-average surface air temperature remained 1.65 degrees Celsius higher than the estimated pre-industrial era values, said the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on Thursday.

Copernicus, implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), also noted that Europe recorded its warmest summer this year, a phenomenon emerging for the first time since 2003. Last month’s record temperatures tied with the warmest July of 2023, Copernicus confirmed. The period from June to August 2026 was the joint-warmest on record globally, on par with 2024.

“The global-average surface air temperature in August 2026 was 16.96 degrees Celsius, which was 0.85 degree Celsius above the 1991–2020 global average. As such, it was the warmest August globally in the ERA5 dataset (a global dataset), surpassing the previous joint record set in 2023 and 2024,” the report said.

Last month, the oceans were warmer than usual due to the ongoing El Niño event. August sea surface temperatures were the joint-highest monthly average recorded across the extra-polar ocean.

Moreover, the average global temperatures recorded in August this year breached the 1.5 degree Celsius benchmark set by the landmark Paris Agreement 2015. This breach is the first since November last year.

On the record temperatures, Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at ECMWF, said, “Combined with record global sea surface temperatures and the warmest summer on record for Western Europe, these observations show how climate change is driving extremes across both the atmosphere and the oceans. The impacts of these conditions are increasingly being felt by communities, economies, and ecosystems across the world.”

France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany witnessed one of the hottest summer seasons in recent years. Many regions reported heatwaves continuing into August, along with extreme heat that began in May. Extreme dryness in August affected France, the UK, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia. Major European rivers such as the Rhine, the Danube, the Southern Bug and the Dnieper flowed exceptionally low, Copernicus reported.

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August over India was the warmest (with respect to minimum temperatures) and the fourth warmest (with respect to maximum temperatures) since 1901, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said.