The past two decades in Europe have been characterized by numerous major heat waves, with record‐breaking temperatures reported also during the summer of 2021. While most previous studies on heat waves were based on land‐only datasets (station or gridded), we use the ERA5 reanalysis to capture also heat wave characteristics over water bodies. An up‐to‐date list of major European heat waves since 1950 is presented, and the 2021 heat wave is evaluated in this long‐term context. This event was record‐breaking in length at the European scale, and in many other aspects (spatial extent, magnitude) comparable to the 2003 and 2010 major heat waves. The summer of 2021 was unprecedented over Europe according to the number of hot days (63) and the earliest start of a major heat wave (June 19), while the 2019 heat wave with record‐breaking temperatures across Western Europe stands out as to its intensity. Another recent major heat wave in 2018 ranked fourth in terms of magnitude. The spatial pattern in occurrence of the most severe heat wave since 1950 in individual parts of Europe is dominated by the 2003 (Western Europe), 2010 (Eastern Europe), 2018 (Scandinavia), and 2021 (Mediterranean) major heat waves. Overall, 83% of the domain area experienced the most severe heat wave in the past two decades (2002–2021), which demonstrates a rapidly changing summer climate in Europe.

Heat waves (HWs) and cold spells (CSs) have pronounced impacts on the natural environment and society. The main aim of this study was to identify major Central European HWs and CSs since 1950 and assess their severity not only from the viewpoint of temperature and duration but also as to the affected area. The HWs and CSs were delimited from the E-OBS gridded data set. An extremity index was proposed that captures joint effects of spatial extent, temperature and duration of HWs and CSs. During the 1950–2012 period, we identified 18 major HWs and 24 major CSs over Central Europe. The most severe HW occurred in summer 1994, followed by the 2006 HW; both these events were far more extreme over Central Europe than HWs in the well-known 2003 and 2010 summers. The most severe CSs occurred in the winters of 1955/1956 and 1962/1963. The recent winter of 2011/2012 was found to be the sixth coldest since 1950/1951 according to the seasonal sum of the extremity index. The HWs and CSs were classified through a hierarchical cluster analysis of their characteristics (temperature amplitude, spatial extent of the core and duration) into four basic types. The established list of major Central European HWs and CSs might be utilized in further analyses. The extremity index may be applied over different areas to perform comparative studies and used also for evaluation of regional climate model simulations.

Thirty-year periods are treated in climatology as spans with relatively representative and stable climatic patterns, which can be used for calculating climate normals. Annual and seasonal series of circulation types were used to compare two 30-year sub-periods, 1961–1990 and 1991–2020, the second one being strongly influenced by recent global warming. This analysis was conducted according to the objective classification of circulation types and the climatic characteristics of sunshine duration, temperature, humidity, precipitation, and wind speed as calculated for the territory of the Czech Republic during the 1961–2020 period. For both sub-periods, their statistical characteristics were calculated, and the statistical significance of differences between them was evaluated. There was a statistically significant increase in the annual frequencies of anticyclonic circulation types and a significant decrease in cyclonic circulation types during 1991–2020 compared with 1961–1990. Generally, in both 30-year periods, significant differences in means, variability, characteristics of distribution, density functions, and linear trends appear for all climatic variables analysed except precipitation. This indicates that the recent 30-year “normal” period of 1991–2020, known to be influenced more by recent climate change, is by its climatic characteristics unrepresentative of the stable climatic patterns of previous 30-year periods.

Compound climate events in which only one variable is extreme (e.g., either hot but no drought or extreme drought but not hot) and events in which both variables are extreme (e.g., drought and heat waves) may have different impacts on hop yields and alpha‐bitter acid contents. Increasing occurrences of compound drought and heat events have led to increased income variability for beer production, and also affecting the major hop growers across Europe (EU). Our study includes the key hop‐growing regions across the EU such as Hallertau (Germany); Úštěcko, Žatecko and Tršická (Czech Republic); Kent (Great Britain); Alsace (France); Lublin (Poland); Koroška (Slovenia) and León and Galicia (Spain). For these regions, we used the concurrent bivariate return period to model the joint probability distributions of daily precipitation and maximum temperature extremes and to provide risk assessments for concurrent drought‐heat waves during the hop‐growing season. We estimated the risk of lower yields from hop cones based on concurrent dry‐cool, dry‐hot, wet‐cool and wet‐hot modes over the target areas. The results show that longer and more severe drought and heat wave concurrences have increased more frequently than shorter concurrences. The degree of risk was estimated as being higher over the extensive hop‐growing areas in the Czech Republic and Germany. A total of 22.4, 12.5 and 7.2% of EU areas with conditions suitable for commercial hop production fell into the moderate, high and very high yield loss risk categories, respectively. Integrating the damage between April and August indicated that more than 62.7% of total yield losses were due to high temperatures under dry conditions and that 21.5% of the yield losses were due to dry‐cool conditions in the top hop‐farming regions. The hotter European droughts caused decreases in noble aromatic hops by 29–68%. This indicates that hop yields are very vulnerable to these events due to a slower rate of adaptation of hops compared to field crops.