Tuesday will probably be the hottest day of the week: It will remain mostly cloudless and temperatures will soar to between 36 and 39 degrees. On the Lower Rhine and in urban areas the 40-degree mark could be cracked. From Wednesday night onwards, showers and thunderstorms are possible.

NRW Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU) is worried how people will cope in the hot weather. "For some, it means great days out in the park, in the garden or by the water. But the intense heat can be dangerous for older people, people with preexisting medical conditions and children," Laumann said on Sunday. His very practical advice: "Drink enough, avoid physical exertion if possible and stay in the shade wherever possible."

Last week, weather expert Karsten Brandt had already pointed out the upcoming heat wave: "On Monday and Tuesday of next week, we could reach temperatures of 40 degrees. It remains to be seen whether this mark will be broken. But the 45 degrees will come sooner than we would like. If not this year, then the next," Brandt said in the GA interview. He notes that new heat records are set almost every year - including this year. 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 quiet thunderstorm that is currently prevailing. This is the weather expert's term for the extreme dryness in Bonn and the region, as well as throughout Germany. "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 region to determine the water content. In the meantime, Brandt notes, there is no water left for the plants.

This in turn leads to the fact that no more soil water can evaporate through solar radiation, the air is thus no longer cooled and the heat becomes even more extreme, Brandt explains the connections. "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 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. This is because it is difficult for the water masses to be absorbed by it and they simply run off.

Heat and drought are also becoming a problem for the forests. On Tuesday, the German Weather Service set the forest fire danger index for large parts of the Rhineland to the highest level 5. According to the index, there is a "very high" risk of forest fires. For the other regions in NRW, level 4 applies, i.e. a "high" danger.

"We are in a catastrophic situation for agriculture and our forests. The current drought leaves me stunned. Especially because hardly any rain is expected in the next few weeks either," says Brandt.

There are even meteorological models that show 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.

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