Euro Heat and Utah Cooling

Much of Europe is in the grips of a heat wave with records falling in many areas.  France and Spain had the worst of it yesterday with high temperatures over 40C (104F) over a significant amount of real estate.  I see a 44.3C/111.7F in the plot below at one location in France.  Brutal.  

Source: https://www.meteociel.fr/observations-meteo/tmaxi.php?region=

Max temperatures get attention, but it is the minimums that kill.  This morning, minima in interior western France were above 25C/77F in some areas.  It's hard to open the windows and get much relief in such conditions.  

Here in Innsbruck it hasn't been as bad.  We're a bit to the east of the ridge axis and the highest temperatures and have the advantage of being at 580 meters/1800 feet in elevation.  The max temp yesterday was 34.7C/94.5F with a min this morning of 19.4C/67F.  We are fortunate to be renting a flat on the lower floor on the north side of a building that doesn't get a lot of sun.  We open the place up sometime in the middle of the night and then close it up at about 8 AM and that keeps it tolerable.  

We also have access to mountains.  On Sunday, a friend and I climbed the Nockspitze south of Innsbruck, which reaches 2400 meters where temperatures were tolerable.  So much so that I was able to hike down in pants and long sleeves to keep my dermatologist happy.  

Temperatures though are expected to climb higher through the end of the week.  For Saturday, the Austrian Weather Service, known as Geosphere, is forecasting a maximum temperature of 38C/100.4F.  The all-time high here is 38.5C/101.3.  That all time high was set on 30 June 2019, one day after we left here on our last long-term stay, so we've seen two of the more extreme heat waves here.  

That said, our lease runs out on Thursday and I turned in my grades today so my work here is done.  We will be living like nomads for a couple of weeks and are planning to move to higher elevations for a few days.  Not all are so fortunate and we have seen people checking on elderly neighbors over the past few days.  When we were here for the 2019 heat wave, our flat was on a higher floor on the south side of the building and much more uncomfortable.  Floor and aspect can make a big difference during these extremes. 

Meanwhile in Utah it looks like you might get a taste of a cool-down this weekend.  The models are advertising a deep trough to try to push into the area.  The lowest hights and coldest air don't look like they will quite make it, but a significant cool down does look to be in store with the Euro producing 700-mb (10,000 ft) temperatures of around -2C at 1800 UTC (1200 MDT) Sunday.

Enjoy every minute of that. July is coming.