Hotter than France
June 2026 — at the peak of the European heatwave, only a sliver of the planet was hotter than France's hottest place.
Per-day values are the hottest 0.25° model grid cell (ECMWF IFS, 00 UTC run). At this resolution Tuesday and Wednesday are effectively tied (~42 °C); the official “record broken” figures are station observations — a separate measure.
How this was made
- Global 2-metre maximum temperature from ECMWF's IFS operational forecast (0.25 degrees) — the same model family The Washington Post used.
- "Hotter than France" means hotter than the single hottest grid cell in metropolitan France that day.
- The percentage is the cosine-latitude area-weighted share of the globe exceeding that threshold.
- Inspired by Ben Noll (The Washington Post). This is an independent reconstruction — not the original graphic.
ECMWF, the IFS, and open data
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts — ECMWF — is backed by some twenty European states, in the EU's orbit. It hosts several Copernicus services: climate, atmosphere, emergency response. They are what let us see a storm, a flood, a heatwave coming — and read climate change itself. The engine behind all of it is the IFS, a model that runs on a supercomputer and simulates the planet's atmosphere days ahead.
An institution, a supercomputer, decades of research — you would expect those forecasts to stay with governments. Yet part of them is now open data, under an open licence. A researcher, a company, a journalist, a developer, an ordinary citizen can download them, recombine them, fold them into a service — commercial ones included — on the single condition of crediting the source. That is Europe's digital strategy in practice: open the data, and let innovation follow. This map was born from it.