By Thursday, temperatures in Bonn and the region will reach up to 30 degrees. On Friday and Saturday the air will cool down to around 25 degrees, but from Sunday the heat will be back. " On Monday and Tuesday of next week, we could reach temperatures of around 40 degrees. It remains to be seen whether that mark will be broken. But 45 degrees will come sooner than we would like. If not this year, then the next," says Brandt. He notes that new heat records are set almost every year - this year was no exception. June has already been extremely warm and July is shaping up to be the same, the meteorologist says. "In the past 30 years, the average temperature has increased by two to three degrees."

The heat is coming to us from the Mediterranean. This week the air is still warming up, but then it will get very hot much faster and that, according to Brandt, is due to the silent storm that is currently prevailing. This is the weather expert's term for the extreme dryness in Bonn and the surrounding region, as well as in Germany as a whole. "The soil has never been as dry as it is now," he warns. Since the eighties, he has been measuring the weight of the soil in Bonn and the surrounding region to determine the water content. Nowadays, Brandt observes, there is no water left for the plants at all.

This in turn leads to the situation that no more soil water can evaporate due to the sun's rays, so the air is thus no longer cooled and the heat becomes even more extreme, Brandt explains the correlation. "The heat and the drought are building up on each other." The drought has not only built up due to a winter and spring with too little rain, but also already due to the dry years of 2018 and 2019, he says, adding that the heavy rain that is falling more and more frequently over Bonn and the region is not helping to irrigate the soil. The reason is that it is difficult for the water masses to be absorbed by the soil and they simply trickle away.

"We are in a catastrophic situation for agriculture and our forests. The current drought leaves me bewildered. Especially because hardly any rain is expected in the next few weeks either," says Brandt. There are even meteorological models that show that there will be no rain until August. Even if the air can cool down a bit after the upcoming heat wave, a next wave will soon follow, Brandt predicts. "We will feel the heat wave particularly strongly in Bonn," says the meteorologist. The federal city is one of the warmest regions in Germany - and also one of the most humid.

You can find the current weather situation in Bonn and the region on wetter.ga.de and the outlook in our weather forecast.