Overview
- The country remains in a declared historical drought with record summer warmth from Copernicus and very low river levels that are already forcing shipping limits at the Rhine’s Kaub gauge.
- Meteorological services say a fresh heat peak will arrive later this week with many areas above 30°C and local highs up to about 36–39°C, raising grassland and forest fire danger and pushing indices in places such as Hessen to warning levels 4–5.
- Operational impacts are tangible now: the Kaub peg has fallen to extreme lows that reduce cargo loads for freighters and increase costs for river transport operators.
- ECMWF-based ensemble forecasts increasingly signal a large‑scale regime shift around mid‑August toward cooler, wetter, more unsettled weather, but other models such as GFS show the heat persisting or returning, so timing and rainfall amounts remain uncertain.
- Experts stress that any rain this month is likely to be uneven and short lived and that meaningful recovery of deep soil moisture and river systems would require widespread, sustained rainfall over major catchments rather than a single event.