Market News

(Bloomberg) -- Thunderstorms are forecast for a swath of Europe from Spain to Greece, while temperatures soar across Germany.

Summer heat is giving way to violent storms, with yellow warnings in place for Spain, western France, parts of the Balkans and Greece. Sicily faces an orange alert on Thursday.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of heat waves, triggering extreme weather events from violent storms to wildfires. As the Mediterranean Sea warms — reaching a record average temperature this month — it’s turbo-charging storms across the region.

Last year’s storms resulted in flooding that caused hundreds of thousands of fish in Lake Karla in the Greek region of Thessaly to be washed into a river. This week those freshwater fish have died as they reached the sea, with their rotting carcasses inundating the port city of Volos.

Now the storms in Greece are bringing the dual threat of both flooding and wildfires caused by lightning strikes, following a prolonged period of drought. The risk of fires is particularly acute in mountainous areas.

As a result, Athens and the surrounding Attica region still face a high risk of wildfires, along with northeast Peloponnese, the island of Evia, and the eastern Aegean Sea islands. There were 28 wildfires in the 24 hours to 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday.

Further north in Europe, the heat will build close to 34C (93F) in Berlin on Thursday. The mean temperature for the German capital could be as much as 9C above the 30-year norm.