Towards a Fifth Heatwave: This Worrying Scenario which is Emerging in France for the Month of August
A large part of France will breathe from this Tuesday 4th August 2026, but this is not expected to last. The extreme heat remains in ambush. Forecast.
There drought soils have been getting worse day after day since the beginning of June. And the forecasts for this first half of August 2026 do not bode well.
Besides thunderstorms, locally very strong this Monday 3rd August, “no rain on the horizon before the 17th August, at best”, warns the meteorologist and oceanographer Yann Amice. And in terms of temperatures, the lights are also red for this first half of August.
A little thermal respite that won’t last…
This Tuesday 4th August 2026, temperatures will be trending downward over a large part of France, but they will still remain high over the southern and eastern half of the country, and they will remain above “normal” until mid -August nationally, with likely a new peak of high heat, from Monday 10th August 2026, according to weather models for this deadline.
This “trough” of the 6th-7th August will remain a window of thermal respite “very modest and largely insufficient to reverse the trend of cumulative water deficit”, analyzes Yann Amice.
The national thermal indicator will start to rise again
The different weather models which carry out a mathematical representation of the atmosphere are still counting on very hot weather, especially in a large part of the south of France “between the 10th August and the 14th August at least”, estimates Yann Amice.
Across France, between the 10th and 11th August, and for several days, the national thermal indicator (ITN), the average of minimum and maximum temperatures at 30 meteorological stations distributed in a balanced manner in France, should still be above the threshold of heatwave, “even if it is the south which will be on the front line” and this emerging heat wave will not reach the extremes of the end of June at this stage of modeling.
In this context of repeated heatwaves, a new anticyclonic ridge at altitude will block over southern Europe, while the temperature of the Mediterranean Sea is abnormally warm. A scenario which will still be conducive, from August 9-11, to the surge in temperatures in the South of France…
Since May, situations of anticyclonic blockages have been occurring in the immediate vicinity of France. As a result, long periods of calm, sunny and warm weather recur recurrently.
Diagram already observed in previous episodes of the summer
The structure that is emerging for next week reproduces the pattern already observed in previous episodes of the summer: “A repositioning of the ridge via a transient relative geopotential trough, followed by an anticyclonic reconstruction from 8th-9th August on the surface”, explains Yann Amice. A scenario which makes a heatwave episode very likely, again, the fifth, between the 12th and 14th August.
From the 4th to the 19th of July 2026, France experienced its second heat wave of the summer, remarkable for its duration (15 days), after a first episode of a very intense early heat wave from the 17th June to the 30th June and a particularly heatwave episode early in May, but which had not reached the thresholds allowing it to be described as a heat wave… And part of France has therefore not yet emerged from this latest heat wave, which began on the 28th July.
The heatwave alert is maintained this Monday 3rd August 2026 in 20 departments, ranging from the Territoire de Belfort to Corsica, via the Var.
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