Global Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard

Europe's heat wave index: unweighted mean event count across qualifying GSN stations within Europe, same station-relative detection as the global index. Unit: events per station per year.

Source: NOAA GHCN-Daily, GCOS Surface Network (GSN) stations, Europe subset

Computing trend…

Continent assignment runs via a point-in-polygon join against Natural Earth's 1:110m country boundaries (the same join drought/wildfire/flooding use for their continent tiles), which places all of Russia in Europe. Europe's GSN station count reaches 150+ by 1949, the same year and reasoning the global heat wave index uses, and holds above 190 through the 2000s -- the densest of the 6 continents tracked here for this variable. The qualifying-station count drops sharply too, from 166 (2018) to 66 (2019) and stays near there since, a contraction sharper than the global index's ~35% drop over the same break. See Methodology for North America's borderline-density second continent index.