July 2022 became one of the planet’s top three hottest Julys amid a summer of record-shattering heat for the Northern Hemisphere.

The extreme temperatures came as deadly heat waves swept across Europe, killing up to 2,000 people in Portugal and Spain, and exacerbated drought-fueled wildfires in the western United States.

Last month’s scorching temperatures appear to fall just between the hottest July ever recorded in 2019 and the second hottest in 2016. That technically puts it in second place. But statistically speaking, this July falls so close to both that the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service simply ranks it among the top three.

Copernicus also found that southwestern Europe — which suffered record-breaking heat over the last few weeks — saw its hottest July of all time.

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