It's just the weather

There were temperatures in particular hot spots in Bosnia that reached 60 degrees Celsius this past week. Across the Balkans daily temperatures have been hovering around 40 C. Worse, night time temperatures, instead of dropping have remained high.

Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Skopje _ Two people have died and hundreds have sought medical assistance as a summer heat wave grips the western Balkans.

A period of extremely warm temperatures started as of this weekend and will last at least three weeks, meteorologists in the region said. They warned that temperatures – even above 40 degrees Celsius – may be set creating temperature highs not seen in the last 100 years. To make the situation even more difficult for the population, this period will also be marked by so-called “tropical nights” where temperatures will remain above 20 or even 30 degrees Celsius overnight.

Further to the northwest things got little weirder. Instead of being killed by the heat, in Germany people have been killed by hailstones the size of tennis balls.

Berlin - A storm that drenched parts of south-western Germany and brought hailstones as big as tennis balls killed a man and injured more than 100 people, police said on Thursday. Less than 24 hours later, a similar hailstorm hit the same area of the Black Forest, knocking a man off a roof as he was repairing damage from the Wednesday evening storm, police said. He was in critical condition. The downpour again flooded building basements. But police said the hailstones had not been as big as those that injured people, hammered cars and smashed windows the previous day.

Hail is a fact of life in a lot of places during the summer, but what happened in Germany is severe. With above normal daily temperatures occurring over the central European landmass and a series of cool, moist air masses moving in from the North Sea the warm updrafts are creating extremely unstable air - the stuff of thunderheads and severe hail storms.

It wasn't just the Schwarzwald and Baden-Wurttemberg that got slammed. Further north, in the seaport of Emden, 30,000 brand new Volkswagen Passats were pummeled by a different hail storm.

The vehicles were parked in the open in the northwestern German town of Emden, one of Europe's three main vehicle-transportation ports. Each year about 1 million vehicles either enter or leave the city's port, according to the Volkswagen Web site. The company employs around 7,900 people there at a plant producing the company's Passat models.

Company spokesman Christoph Adomat told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that a significant proportion of the 30,000 vehicles parked outside had suffered chipped paint or dings, although no windshields were broken. A VW spokesman told the Dow Jones Newswires that around 100 extra workers were being sent to Emden for a quality check on all the vehicles.

"We need to make certain that all customers receive a car that is absolutely in good working order," Adomat told the Associated Press, adding that the company was insured against hail damage.

Although the company has not released an estimate of the damages incurred, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung it could reach the hundreds of millions of euros.

Hmmm. If this holds up it's going to happen again... soon. With Spain now enduring extreme high temperatures, northern Italy is next in line to have a bunch of ice balls dropped on them.

Somewhere, someone has a picture of a Stevenson Screen next to a building which disproves any of the above is actually happening.