Still 37 degrees in Italy, then the reversal: 70,000 hectares already burned by early August

On Tuesday, September 8, Italy remains under summer conditions: peaks of 35 degrees in the North and 36-37 in Central-Southern Italy, according to forecasts gathered by la Repubblica. The reversal is announced for the following day: Meteo.it places the arrival of the month’s first Atlantic disturbance on September 9 over the North and Tuscany, bringing an inflow of cooler air.

The scale of the shift can be read in a single city: for Milan, a change is indicated from 33 degrees on September 8 to 26 on the 9th. Across the country as a whole, Repubblica notes a possible drop of up to 8 degrees and rain between Wednesday and Friday. These are forecasts, not measurements: the margin of error for a three-day forecast is not stated in the sources, and the actual value will only be known after the fact.

What summer leaves behind

The season’s tally, compiled by One Health Focus, places Italy within a global sequence. The news currently comes from a single source (the One Health Focus review, based on data from environmental and civil protection agencies); no independent confirmation is available, and since these are aggregate figures we flag this before reporting them.

At the start of August 2026, roughly 70,000 hectares had burned in Italy: an area 133% larger than the average of the last twenty years. Comparison with a twenty-year average is the correct way to read fire data, as it neutralizes an isolated exceptional year; it should however be kept in mind that this count stopped at the start of August and does not measure the entire season, for which we have no total.

Outside Italy, the same review records, in August, new floods and landslides in several Chinese regions, fueled by the remnants of typhoons. In Indonesia, in July, nearly 95,000 hectares burned, and in August more than 9,000 fire hotspots were detected. On August 1, 2026, a magnitude 4.7 earthquake caused damage in Pozzuoli, in the Naples area: a seismic event, not a climatic one, that enters the tally as an episode of the same summer.

The residue that remains alight

The drop in temperatures does not automatically close the fire season, and in any case does not arrive across the whole country at the same time: the disturbance of September 9 is placed by Meteo.it over the North and Tuscany, while the highest values of September 8 — 36-37 degrees according to Repubblica — concern Central-Southern Italy. Southern regions therefore remain in summer conditions while the North is already in transition, and the drop of up to 8 degrees indicated by Repubblica is spread over the span between Wednesday and Friday.

What we don’t know

We do not have a consolidated national figure on hectares burned by the end of the season, nor an institutional source confirming the early-August count. We do not know the geographic extent of the expected worsening beyond the North and Tuscany, nor its intensity in millimeters of rain. The forecasts for September 8 and 9 are elaborations from two private meteorological outlets, not civil protection bulletins.

The first verifiable element will arrive on Wednesday: if the disturbance arrives within the indicated timeframe, Milan’s figures — 33 degrees on the 8th, 26 on the 9th — are the most immediate benchmark for comparison.