Environ. Res. Lett. 15 (2020) 094077 https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aba3d4 Environmental Research Letters LETTER Human contribution to the record-breaking June and July 2019 OPEN ACCESS heatwaves in Western Europe RECEIVED 31 December 2019 Robert Vautard1, Maarten van Aalst2, Olivier Boucher1, Agathe Drouin3, Karsten Haustein4, 5 6 4 3 3 REVISED Frank Kreienkamp , Geert Jan van Oldenborgh , Friederike E L Otto , Aur´elien Ribes , Yoann Robin , 18 June 2020 Michel Schneider3, Jean-Michel Soubeyroux3, Peter Stott7, Sonia I Seneviratne8, Martha M Vogel8 ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION 9 8 July 2020 and Michael Wehner 1 PUBLISHED Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace, Paris, France 28 August 2020 2 University of Twente and Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, The Netherlands 3 M´et´eo-France, Toulouse, France 4 Original content from Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom 5 this work may be used Deutsche Wetterdienst, Offenbach, Germany under the terms of the 6 KNMI, de Bilt, The Netherlands Creative Commons 7 U.K. Met. Office, Exeter, United Kingdom Attribution 4.0 licence. 8 ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland Any further distribution 9 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, United States of America of this work must maintain attribution to E-mail:
[email protected] the author(s) and the title of the work, journal Keywords: climate change, heat wave, extreme event attribution citation and DOI. Supplementary material for this article is available online Abstract Two extreme heatwaves hit Western Europe in the summer of 2019, with historical records broken by more than a degree in many locations, and significant societal impacts, including excess mortality of several thousand people.