May’s weather and Spring 2026 in the context of the last 100 years

By Frank Bosse, KlimaNachrichten editor

Germany’s DWD national weather service has published its monthly, preliminary, data for May 2026.

These data also include the preliminary regional averages for temperature (14.1 °C) and precipitation (65 mm).

In terms of temperatures, 14 of the previous 100 Mays were warmer than May 2026, with 2018 taking the top spot at 16 °C. There is a clear warming trend; only three Mays were warmer before 1980 (data).

Precipitation, on the other hand, shows a very mixed picture in May: of the 100 previous years, 44 were drier, 25 of which occurred before 1980. The driest May was in 1989 (28.2 mm), the wettest in 2007 (131.1 mm). Graphically:

May mean temperatures in Germany [°C]

The graph above shows the raw data and (in bold) a 30-year low-pass filter applied to the Loess data, similar to the DWD method.

A rise can be seen up to around 1950, followed by a drop of approximately 0.5 °C, a rise of 1.4 °C after 1980, and a more or less flat trend after 2006. There is also a great deal of variability in the data after 2000; between 2018 and 2019, the range is 5 °C!

A lot of weather (as is usual for individual months), yet the trend is still clear. Spring as a whole (averages for March, April, May:

Spring mean temperatures, Germany

Here, the trend is even clearer after 1980, with temperatures rising by around 2 °C since then. At 9.9 °C, 2026 is 1 degree cooler than the warmest spring on record (2024), and there have been a total of six warmer springs, none of which occurred before 1980.

May mean precipitation in Germany [mm]

To put it briefly: quite a bit of “fluctuation” with no clear trend. Interestingly, between 2005 and 2015 there was a slight upward “spike”: apparently by chance, there was a cluster of “wet May months”.

What can be seen in the temperatures is a ‘climate effect’, quite robust, although it has been stagnating in May for about 20 years, despite the record set in 2018. For spring as a whole, no trend stagnation is apparent.

With the best will in the world, nothing of the sort can be detected in the precipitation. It could become more variable in May; the wild ‘spikes’ after 2000 perhaps suggest as much, when compared with the years before 1980. Overall, May 2026 was completely normal in terms of precipitation. Any current ‘drought fantasies’ (we reported on these) are entirely misplaced and not evidence-based. The same applies to the spring as a whole:

Spring mean precipitation in Germany [mm]

Summary

Although it was not particularly wet (127.1 l), this is by no means exceptional. A total of 14 of the 100 previous springs were drier, six of which occurred before 1980. These data also show no climate trend, only a great deal of natural variability.