Belgium Pants Through Its Warmest Night since 1833

On Friday night, Belgium experienced it warmest night since the records began to document the weather back in 1833. At Ukkel (Brussels), the temperature came down to 24.5 degrees Celsius (76.1 Fahrenheit), storming the earlier record of June 2002, said the VRT's weather presenter, Frank Deboosere, according to newsbe. "We expected very hot air to arrive on Saturday, but in fact it arrived a little bit earlier, on Friday night."

While the temperature in the Ukkel measuring station hovered at 28.4 Celsius at 10 pm, and at 25.3 at 3 a.m., the bottom-most temperature was 24.5 Celsius, which fanned it to make it the warmest night since records started in 1833, and probably the warmest in Belgian history.

Earlier, the record was broken 13 years ago in 18 June 2002, when the temperature in Ukkel got stuck at 23.9 Celsius. Last night's hot weather had the ozone levels shooting up till deep into the night. Even at midnight, the European alert level was overshot at four Belgian measuring stations at midnight, an exceptional record. It happened once in 2006 only at 11 p.m. and merely at one venue. Now the heat wave was declared 'official'.

Hence, Belgian heat wave is confirmed, even as the conditions were met on Saturday, when the temperature pushed 30 degrees. While a heat wave needs to make it cross 25 degrees Celsius for five successive days, at least three days showing temperatures of 30 Celsius or more, the heat wave is the first one that has struck since July 2013.