The UK Just Had Its Hottest Summer Since Records Began in 1884
The United Kingdom recorded its warmest summer since national records began in 1884, the Met Office said Sept. 1 in provisional figures, and a rapid attribution analysis released alongside them put the season at around 130 times more likely because of human-induced climate change.
Met Office data put the UK average mean temperature for the season at 16.5 degrees Celsius (61.7 F), provisionally the warmest summer and the warmest season of any kind in the series. That is 0.40 degrees above the previous record of 16.1 degrees, set in 2025, which the agency's head of climate attribution, Mark McCarthy, called "a significant margin for a seasonal temperature."
England, Wales and Northern Ireland each broke their own summer mean-temperature records, according to the release, and Scotland had its joint-sixth warmest. The Met Office lists 2018, 2006 and 2003 as the next three warmest at 15.7 degrees apiece, which moves the summer of 1976 down to seventh.
Daily temperatures peaked at 38.1 degrees (100.6 F) at Kew Gardens on Aug. 13, the agency said, and Lingwood in Norfolk set a UK daily record for the month of June at 38.0 degrees. Fifty-four Met Office weather stations broke their all-time daily maximum temperature record over the season.
The attribution figure came from comparing two large ensembles of computer simulations, one of them with human influence on greenhouse gas concentrations removed, using peer-reviewed methods set out in a published technical report. Met Office scientists estimated the return period for a summer like 2026 at 1,148 years in a climate without human emissions, a figure the agency says carries large uncertainty at that extreme, against roughly one year in nine in the present climate.
It was a dry and sunny season too. The Met Office recorded the UK's third driest July in its series and England's driest, and 621.9 hours of sunshine made it the sixth sunniest UK summer since sunshine records began in 1910. Those figures come from HadUK-Grid, the Met Office's 1-kilometer gridded set of station observations.
