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The report provides a summary of the climate in Europe, in the Arctic, and globally, based on authoritative data sources compiled by institutions across Europe. The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) and the Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics Group at GIUZ contributed glacier data and analyses.
In 2024, temperatures in Europe and its lakes were the highest on record, central Europe and Spain suffered from severe flooding, whereas south-eastern Europe experienced strong heat-waves. At the same time, glaciers in Scandinavia and Svalbard showed the strongest mass losses on record and for 2024 also worldwide. The average ice thickness loss of glaciers in the Alps was again large (-1.2 m), but this is only one half and one third of the mass loss experienced in 2023 (-2.4 m) and 2024 (-3.6 m), respectively. A special visualisation in the report (animated in the online version) illustrates the strong area loss of glaciers in the Alps between the 1970s and 2015/16.
For Europe, a strong east-west contrast was found for several variables (e.g. cloud cover, sun-shine duration, precipitation, temperatures), largely due to a circulation anomaly with higher pressure over Eastern Europe. The Mediterranean Sea reached with nearly 29 °C in mid-August its highest recorded average temperature. On a global scale, glacier mass loss contributed 1.2 mm to sea-level rise, not much less than the 1.5 mm record from 2023. The five years with the largest global glacier mass losses have all occurred within the past six years.
Online animation and on page 34 in the PDF version of the report.
| European State of the Climate 2024 report, jointly released by Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) European snow and glaciers in 2024 |
