Monthly review June 2022

The first summer month of June presented itself in our region with a mean temperature of
19.9 °C, 3.5 degrees too warm compared to the climate reference period 1961-1990. Thus, it
was the fourth warmest June since 1961. In June, the air temperature in Dresden has already
risen by an average of 2.1 K in the period 1961-2022. On 19 June, new June temperature
records were reported in many places (e.g. 39.2 degrees in Dresden-Strehlen). Even in
Garsebach b. Meißen almost 38 degrees were measured (Fig.1). The cold and wet weather
from the west and northwest, typical of June in the past, was again absent.
The sun shone for a total of 289 hours. This corresponds to a clear plus of 90 hours. In terms
of sunshine hours, June thus reached 3rd place in the ranking of all June months since
measurements began, after the record years 2019 and 2003. In June, the sunshine duration
in Dresden increased by an average of 39 hours in the period 1961-2022.
After the already very dry spring, the first summer month of June also brought far too little
rain compared to the reference value 1961-1990. The sum of all individual precipitation
measurements in Coswig in May was only 26.5 mm. The monthly total thus corresponded to
only 43 % of the reference value for this month. The annual precipitation balance so far in
2022 thus now comes to a clear minus of 87.6 mm. Accordingly, the plants were increasingly
exposed to drought and heat stress.
Currently, the drought monitor of the Halle-Leipzig Environmental Research Centre shows
that the persistent exceptional drought of the soil down to a depth of 1.8 m has again
become much more established in our region.

Weather pattern:

Over a longer period of time, the weather pattern in Central Europe was characterised by a
repeatedly regenerating long-wave trough (low-pressure zone extending from north to
south in higher atmospheric layers) over the Eastern Atlantic and Western Europe. There
was no heavy rainfall in our region. Only a precipitation area of the small wave depression
SCARLETT crossed our region in the night of 27.06. and temporarily relieved the drought-
stressed plants with widespread rainfall (10 - 13 mm).