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Many parts of the UK are in the throes of their third heatwave
The UK is breaking heat and rainfall records increasingly frequently as its climate continues to warm, the Met Office has warned.
The country’s changing weather patterns mean the UK now experiences a “notably different” climate to what it was just a few decades ago, its State of the UK Climate report says.
We now have many more very hot days and many fewer extremely cold nights, according to this latest assessment.
It shows just how much global warming caused by the vast emissions of greenhouse gases our civilisation creates is reshaping the country’s climate.
Climate change is bringing more severe weather events like storms and flooding – and inevitably the country’s changing climate is having an impact on the natural world, with some species suffering.
The report focuses on 2024, when the UK experienced its second warmest February, warmest May, warmest spring, fifth warmest December, and fifth warmest winter since records began in 1884.
The Met Office highlights that some of these records have already been surpassed in 2025 – more evidence of this trend towards more extreme weather.
This summer many parts of the country are in the throes of their third heatwave with very warm weather reaching into Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland as well as southern England.
The first hosepipe ban of the year was imposed in Yorkshire last week following England’s warmest June on record, which came after the country’s driest and sunniest spring for 132 years.
Yorkshire and the north west of England were declared in official drought by the Environment Agency in June. At least one region is expected to be added to the list when the UK’s National Drought Group meets on Tuesday.
Mike Kendon, a Met Office climate scientist and lead author of the State of the UK Climate report, said: “Every year that goes by is another upward step on the warming trajectory our climate is on.
“Observations show that our climate in the UK is now notably different to what it was just a few decades ago.”
Wetter as well as hotter weather
As an island squeezed between the vast Atlantic Ocean and continental Europe, the UK sits at the intersection of a whole series of major air masses. That’s why the country’s climate is so changeable and that variability also makes mapping some climate changes more difficult.
Rainfall patterns fluctuate much more than temperature, the Met Office says, but it finds that, as well as warming up, the UK is also getting wetter, with rainfall increasing significantly during the winter. Between October and March, rainfall in 2015-2024 was 16% higher than in 1961–1990, it says.
Behind all these changes is the relentless rise in average temperatures driven by climate change, the Met Office says. Global temperatures have risen by over 1.3C since the industrial revolution as humans continue to release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate.
The Met Office calculates that the UK is warming at a rate of around 0.25C per decade, with the 2015-2024 period 1.24C warmer than the period between 1961-1990.
As the UK’s national weather service, the Met Office is the custodian of the Central England Temperature record, the longest running weather record in the world, based on measurements taken using thermometers and other instruments. It spans from 1659 to the present and it shows that recent warming has far exceeded any observed temperatures in over 300 years.
The last three years have been in the UK’s top five warmest on record, with 2024 the fourth warmest year in records dating back to 1884.
Even a small shift in temperatures can significantly increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, as the graph below shows.
Look how, as the distribution of temperatures shifts, those that were previously extreme are brought into the range and new extremes become significantly more likely.
We are often talking about how it used to be colder back in the day. Well that is borne out by the Met Office’s data. We really are getting increasingly fewer cold days. The Met Office says there were 14 fewer days with air frosts – when the air temperature falls below zero – in the last decade compared to the period 1931 to 1990.
Flood risk growing
As in recent years, floods and storms caused the worst severe weather damage to the UK last year.
A series of named storms that pummelled the UK beginning in the autumn of 2023 helped cause widespread flooding in early January. That contributed to the wettest winter half year – October 2023 to March 2024 – in over 250 years.
Areas particularly badly hit by flooding included eastern Scotland, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and the West Midlands, with some places recording three to four times their usual rainfall for September.
In early January of 2024 the Royal Shakespeare Company had to cancel performances for two evenings in a row because of flooding in Stratford-upon-Avon. In November a wall collapsed in Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire after water in a local brook rose, flooding the town centre.
Met Office Chief Scientist Professor Stephen Belcher said the evidence of the impacts climate change is already bringing showed the urgent need for the UK to adapt to cope with future extremes.
“The climate is likely to continue to change, and we need to prepare for the impacts this will have on the weather we experience,” he said.
For the first time this report highlights that UK sea level is rising faster than the global average.
As sea levels continue to rise around the UK, the risk of flooding is only going to increase further, says Dr Svetlana Jevrejeva from the National Oceanography Centre.
“We know from historical events it is only a matter of time until the UK is next in the path of a major storm surge event,” she said.
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A severe flood alert was issued for the River Nene in Northampton in January 2024
Nature is changing with the climate
Inevitably the UK’s changing climate is having an impact on the natural world.
Spring in 2024 was earlier than the average for 12 of the 13 spring events on record and was the earliest in the series from 1999 for both frogspawn appearing and blackbirds nesting.
The timing of seasonal activity in plants and animals is known as phenology and is collected by a network of volunteers coordinated by the Nature’s Calendar citizen science project.
The changing pattern of natural events can have a huge impact. Dormice and hedgehogs – two of the UK’s most threatened mammals – are particularly affected when the weather is very warm, for example.
getty
Hedgehogs – just one of the UK’s wild animals that hot weather does not favour
Fruits and nuts ripen earlier in hot weather and that means fewer are available in the autumn when these animals are trying to build up the reserves of fat they need to see them through winter.
At the Alice Holt forest research centre outside London they are investigating how our trees and forests can be made more resilient to the country’s future climate.
The sad fact is that many of our current tree species just can’t cope, says Dr Gail Atkinson, the head of Climate Change Science at the centre.
“After a drought you can see reduced growth, so trees aren’t growing as we would expect them to,” she says.
“If you look up in the canopy you can see the leaves looking a little bit raggedy and there are other signs of stress as you’re walking through the woodland including extreme examples you might find that the trees have actually died.”
Studies at Alice Holt show one species that could do well as the UK continues to get hotter and wetter are coastal redwoods from California. It has been growing trees from different latitudes for the last 60 years to see how they fare in the UK climate.
It means that, in the decades to come, the world’s tallest trees could become a common sight here in the UK.