For over a year now, barely a month has gone by in which Austria's climate record books haven't had to be rewritten, and September 2024 is no exception. This time, though, it was less about temperatures as in most recent months, and more about rainfall levels that had never been recorded in many parts of the country. These led to a catastrophic flood and are statistically difficult for climatologists to classify given their scale. 

September 2024 initially picked up seamlessly where the record-hot summer left off, with the first days of the month bringing sunny beach weather and extreme heat. But then came an extraordinary weather breakdown. Within just a few days, temperatures dropped by around 20 degrees. Persistent rain and storms followed, along with a severe onset of winter in the mountain regions. It wasn't until the second half of the month that calmer, early-autumnal weather finally settled in.

The sharp temperature swings are smoothed out in the statistics, which is why the monthly average turns out to be relatively unremarkable. The area-wide mean air temperature in September 2024 in the lowlands, excluding mountain stations, was 0.7 degrees above the 1991–2020 average, placing it 43rd in the 258-year measurement record. On the summits, by contrast, it was marginally cooler than average, by 0.1 degrees. Overall, September was once again above-average warm across Austria — the sixteenth consecutive month to be so, by far the longest such streak since records began.

More on this at: orf.at