The heatwave across northern Europe has been made twice as likely by climate change, according to an international team of scientists.

Preliminary data collected from stations across the region by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) network confirmed climate scientists’ fears that the heat has been exacerbated by global warming.

Temperatures recorded in the Arctic Circle were “unprecedented”, while further south in the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland, the odds of the current heatwave more than doubled.

“The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common,” said one of the report’s authors Dr Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

“What was once regarded as unusually warm weather will become commonplace – in some cases, it already has.”

Their findings are a preliminary study because the full analysis will take months to compile, but nevertheless they said the impact of climate change was “unambiguous”.

In total, the team took readings from seven weather stations in northern Europe during the hottest three day period. Two were taken in Finland, and one each in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Data was not available from UK stations to include in this early analysis.

The WWA team will now publish these results formally in a scientific journal, and will follow them up with a more in-depth analysis of the hot summer of 2018.

Scientists have become increasingly confident attributing individual weather events to climate change by modelling what conditions would be like without climate change, and comparing current events to historical trends.

Previously, researchers found that Hurricane Harvey’s devastating rainfall was made three times more likely by climate change. The deadly storm killed more than 30 people and destroyed thousands of homes as it swept across Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. Authorities estimated it cost $125bn (£96bn).