They are of great importance to geophysical research at the University of Graz: the measurements taken by the weather station in the area of Heinrichstraße 31 – under the scientific supervision of Ulrich Foelsche – provide daily data on, amongst other things, temperature and precipitation. The data is also fed into the GeoSphere Austria monitoring network and is therefore published as the official weather data for the provincial capital, Graz, on many platforms.
And what had already become apparent has now been confirmed by the analyses carried out by the technical supervisors Christoph Resch-Anzengruber and Philipp Rohr.
The hottest day so far this year was recorded on 4 August, with a temperature of 37.8 degrees Celsius. This fell just a few tenths of a degree short of the all-time record of 38.1 degrees Celsius, set on 29 July 2013 and 8 August 2013. However, four of the top 10 hottest days are from 2026 alone.
Record-breaking summer
However, records for hot and extremely hot days were broken in the summer of 2026. There were six days with temperatures above 35 degrees, compared with four in 2013. Incidentally, since records began, the University of Graz weather station has recorded a total of 26 days with temperatures above 35 degrees.
There have been 44 so-called ‘hot days’ with temperatures above 30 degrees to date. This is particularly remarkable for meteorologist Ulrich Foelsche from the Institute of Physics, as it means the ‘summer of the century’ in 2003, with 41 hot days, has been relegated to second place on the list.
Another striking fact: over the past 132 years, 137 tropical nights – during which the temperature never drops below 20 degrees – have been recorded, nine of them this year alone. In 2024, there were as many as eleven tropical nights.
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