New record again

Spring is the third extremely warm season in a row

The start of spring in particular was exceptionally warm - many people sought to cool off with short sleeves on the Danube Canal in Vienna, for example.(Bild: APA/HERBERT P. OCZERET)

From a global perspective, the weather has been setting records month after month for more than a year now - and that doesn't stop at spring in Germany either. After the much too warm fall and winter, it is already the third extremely warm season in a row in this country.

Climate change has not spared the Alpine republic either, as the preliminary results from Geosphere Austria make impressively clear - according to them, this year's meteorological spring was the warmest in recorded history.

Spring too warm and very rainy
In the lowlands, temperatures were 1.9 degrees above the average for the 1991 to 2020 climate period, with precipitation 20 percent above average and sunshine hours nine percent below average, it was reported on Friday. In the summit regions, temperatures were 1.6 degrees Celsius above average, which means third place in the 174-year mountain measurement series.

The three months of March, April and May have never been so warm on average, both in the lowlands and their 258-year measurement history and across the whole of Austria. Nevertheless, there was one phase that was clearly too cold - in the second half of April.

Extreme outliers are becoming the norm 
The ten warmest springs in the lowland measurement series (HISTALP dataset), which has been in existence since 1767, were almost all in the recent past: 2024, 2007, 2018, 1811, 1794, 2011, 2000, 2017, 2009, 2014. "Since the 1990s, we have almost only experienced springs that were significantly too warm and hardly ever too cool," says Geosphere climatologist Alexander Orlik.

"There were also very warm springs in 1794 and 1811, but these were extreme outliers. Back then, there were also many years with springs that were significantly too cool and the overall temperature level in a spring was around two degrees cooler than today."

Fruit growers in particular are moaning
The phase of wintry weather in April slowed down plant growth and caused frost damage to grape and apricot crops, for example. In the two months prior to this, the development of the plants was accelerated to such an extent that some had their earliest flowering date since the observation period began in 1946. The apricot blossom was around three weeks ahead of the average from 1991 to 2020, and the apple, lilac and black elderberry blossoms also reached their earliest flowering dates since 1946 this year.

The three meteorological spring months also brought above-average precipitation. In total, this was around 20 percent above the long-term average in the Austria-wide evaluation for 2024. Spring 2024 was therefore the fifth wetter-than-average season in a row (since spring 2023).

Not too wet everywhere
The regional precipitation evaluation of spring 2024 shows clear differences. In the area from the Tyrolean lowlands via Salzburg and Upper Austria to the Weinviertel, conditions were about average to slightly too dry (plus 15 to minus 25 percent). In contrast, it was much too wet in the west and south of Austria (plus 15 to plus 75 percent), especially in Upper Carinthia (plus 90 percent in some places).

Tornadoes also caused a stir
Storms were also recorded. There was a tornado in Graz-Eggenberg and in Schattendorf (Burgenland) on May 21 in the course of powerful thunderstorms. In both cases, wind speeds of around 120 km/h caused some damage such as uprooted trees and partially covered roofs.

However, according to Geosphere, tornadoes are not as rare in Austria as is generally assumed. Largely complete data has been available since 1998, when systematic analyses of storm damage suspected to be caused by tornadoes began. Since then, there have been an average of four tornadoes per year in Austria. The annual fluctuations are large and range from no known cases (2008) to seven (2004 and 2023).