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Gerhard Lux from national weather service  DWD said he could see no signs that chillier weather would be returning “Not a lot can come from here on,” he said.

He added that it appeared winter had left without really arriving in the first place. This season there was very little snow compared with an average German winter.

“For the time of year it was 2.5C warmer than it normal,” he said. In the states of Thuringia, Saxony and Bavaria, it was 3C warmer than it should have been.

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Winter 2013/14 was, Lux said “one of the ten warmest since 1881.”

The winter of 2012/13 saw snow fall on 36 days and 58 frosty days – while this year there were only 35 days of frost. Five of these were frosty for the entire day while the year before there were 28 days of full frost.

“From where I'm standing today this winter was unusually mild," Lux added. 

Sun and showers are forecast for much of Germany on Wednesday.

Temperatures on Thursday will reach a high of 14 degrees C in the south and south-west of Germany. It will also be sunny in the east, but wet in the north west of the country. 

Germany comes to aid of USA

The extremely harsh winter which has hit some US states means supplies of grit have been running out – whereas in Germany the mild winter has left a surplus of grit.

To help out, Germany has sent a ship carrying 26,000 tons of road salt from Wismar in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania across the Atlantic, the Bild newspaper reported on Tuesday. 

It is the heaviest shipment that has even been transported from that harbour. The ship will take ten days to reach the US, where it will land New York and be used to grit roads. 

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