France is experiencing its hottest September on record, Météo-France announced on Friday September 26. With extraordinary temperatures at the start of the month and a heat wave beginning, “we are already completely sure that this month of September will be the hottest ever recorded in mainland France”, “with an average temperature of 21 .5°C” still provisional, or at least 3.5°C above the normals of the previous three decades, said climatologist Christine Berne during a press briefing.
The summer of 2023, marked by exceptional temperatures at the end of August, had already been considered among the hottest historically recorded in France, only beaten by the record summer of 2003 and the two very recent summers of 2022 and 2018, in an analysis published by Météo-France on September 4.
For June, July and August, “the average temperature of 21.8°C is higher than the 1991-2020 normal of 1.4°C,” the national meteorological agency said in a report. Thus “the summer of 2023 ranks fourth among the hottest summers since 1900”, behind the summers of 2003 (2.7°C) and 2022 (2.3°C), and “almost at the same level” as the summer 2018 (1.5°C).
On a national scale, two heat periods affected the country: “After an almost generalized hot sequence from July 8 to 11, and particularly marked in the South-East, a late heat wave affected a large part of the country August 17-24.” Each month, across France, “the average temperature was above seasonal norms”, i.e. 2.6°C in June, 0.8°C in July and 0.9°C in August .
