Summer 2026 agroclimatic bulletin published for southern Europe

The summer 2026 edition of the agroclimatic bulletin is now available through the Copernicus Climate Data Store. It covers June to August for the Mediterranean basin and reports on the indicators the service tracks each season: growing degree days, dry spell length, heat stress days above 35 °C and root-zone soil moisture anomalies.

Heat accumulation ran ahead of the reference period almost everywhere south of the Alps. In the Ebro, Po and Thessaly plains, growing degree days reached the seasonal total roughly two weeks earlier than the 1991–2020 median, compressing the window between flowering and harvest for maize and sunflower.

What the indicators show

Three signals stand out in this edition. Each is reported at NUTS-2 level and as gridded fields in the underlying dataset.

• Dry spells lengthened. The longest continuous dry spell exceeded 28 days in central Spain and eastern Greece, the third consecutive summer above that threshold.
• Heat stress days doubled in places. Parts of Andalusia and Sicily recorded more than 40 days above 35 °C against a reference average close to 20.
• Soil moisture recovered late. Root-zone moisture returned to average only in the second half of September, after rainfall in the western basin.

Irrigation demand followed the same pattern. Basin authorities in Spain and Italy reported allocation decisions taken earlier in the campaign than in 2025, with several districts moving to rotational supply before the end of July. The bulletin documents how seasonal forecast information entered those decisions where it was available.

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Growers do not need more data. They need the same data arriving in time to change a decision.

Implications for the autumn window

For winter cereals, the late moisture recovery narrows the practical sowing window in rainfed areas of Iberia. The bulletin does not issue recommendations, but it flags the indicator thresholds that national advisory services use when adjusting sowing dates, and points to the seasonal outlook for October to December in the Climate Data Store.

The next edition, covering autumn 2026, is scheduled for publication in December. Bulletins are released quarterly and remain open access under the Copernicus licence. A summary version is circulated through the service newsletter, and the full indicator set is documented in the bulletin methodology note.