Showers and cooler days: First normal summer in NL in years

While many in the Netherlands are experiencing the summer as too wet and somewhat on the cold side, this is actually what summers in the country look like on average, Buienradar meteorologist William Huizinga said to RTL Nieuws. "After years, we have a normal Dutch summer again."

A normal summer in the Netherlands has a mix of sunshine and showers and maximums around 22 degrees. And July looked a lot like that. The average 24-hour temperature was 18 degrees, just below the usual average of 18.3 degrees. And precipitation was also average at 80 millimeters, though there were significant outliers.

"The precipitation was very unevenly distributed. Only 30 mm fell in the top of Noord-Holland, 130 to 140 mm in the eastern half of the country," Huizinga said. Limburg saw the "absolute extreme", with 150 to 200 mm of rain falling. Heerlen even got 230 mm. "In the tropics that's not unusual, but here it is bizarre."

According to Huizinga, it is not surprising that some people may experience this summer as wetter and colder than usual. "I think the contrast is so great because we had fairly stable periods with prolonged drought and higher than normal temperatures in the previous summers."

July 2018 saw a record amount of sunshine, with little rain and high temperatures, Huizinga said. July 2019 was warm, quite dry and sunny. And July 2020 was a bit cooler, but there was a heatwave in August. The number of summer days, with temps above 25 degrees, halved from nine in July last year, to four this year.

"If we now have a summer that is normal by Dutch standards, we immediately write it off as a bad summer," Huizinga said.