This summer has provisionally been the warmest on record in the United Kingdom, according to figures from the Met Office. As reported, the national weather service has confirmed what many people had thought or at least suspected across England and Wales, namely that the season just gone was indeed the warmest in a record that stretches all the way back to 1884. The announcement sets a new benchmark for how hot a British summer has been in well over a century of measurements.
The headline figure is a seasonal average that covers the whole of the summer. According to the report, the average temperature recorded across the three months of June, July and August, taking in both night time and day time, was 16.5 degrees. That is the mean value across the entire season, and it is the number that has pushed this summer past every other summer in the long-running record held by the Met Office.
What makes the new record striking is how clearly it has overtaken the previous one. As reported, the mark of 16.5 degrees beats by some margin the last record of 16.1 degrees, which had been set only the previous year. While a difference of a few tenths of a degree might not sound like much in everyday terms, forecasters stressed that in these seasonal averages it is substantial and comfortably breaks the earlier figure.
The heat did not arrive in a single burst but came in repeated spells through the season. According to the report, the summer brought five widespread heat waves, with the one in June singled out as particularly notable because it was also very humid. That combination left many people complaining about sleepless nights back in June, as the warmth persisted overnight as well as during the day.
Some of the individual milestones from the season had never been seen before. As reported, there was 30-degree heat on 40 different days over the course of the summer, something that has never happened before in the record. On top of that, June itself was the hottest on record, underlining how much of the season's exceptional warmth was concentrated in its opening month before the later heat waves followed.
The prolonged warmth and lack of rain also left their mark on the ground. According to the report, the conditions helped bring drought across all of Wales and across two thirds of England, with the dryness described as contributing to a range of knock-on effects during the season. The combination of repeated heat waves and widespread drought shaped much of what the country experienced through June, July and August.
Forecasters framed the new record as part of a longer pattern rather than a one-off. As reported, these new heat records keep tumbling, which they described as a sign of how the climate is slowly changing, with the baseline shifting even as temporary weather patterns come and go on top of it. The provisional summer figures, they suggested, are another data point in that steadily rising trend across the United Kingdom.