While the rest of us are enjoying the early summer sunshine and record-setting temperatures, farmers and gardeners are beginning to express concern that it is perhaps a bit too dry.

A scant 11 millimetres of rain has fallen on average across Denmark this month, and most of that due to thunderstorms, not steady rainfall. That’s about one-third of the amount of rain that falls during a typical Danish May.

Sunshine Island indeed
Bornholm is parching with just four millimetres of moisture falling throughout the entire month, and some towns on the east coast of Jutland are even drier, with Horsens getting just 2.1 millimetres of rain in all of May.

Those places hit by the thunderstorms, especially on Ascension Day, are faring a bit better.

DMI’s drought index, which measures the risk of drought in Denmark on a scale from 1 to 10, currently stands at 6.8 for the country as a whole, which means that there is generally an ‘increased risk of drought’. In the northern and eastern part of the country the index is already at eight, and there is little or no rain in the forecast.

Sunny, warm and dry weather will continue
In fact, everything seems to point toward dry weather continuing for a while, as temperatures rise at the same time. Temperatures during the week will be around 25 degrees, heading up to 27-28 degrees in many places by the weekend, with bright sunshine everywhere.

Should May end completely without rain, it will be the driest one in 59 years. The longest and most intense drought in Denmark happened in 1992, when there was virtually no rain from May 12 until July 10.

June 1992 is the driest month ever measured in Denmark, when only one millimetre of rain was measured on national level.