Met Office Confirms UK Experienced Its Hottest Summer on Record Driven by Climate Change

The UK has just experienced its hottest summer on record, caused by human-induced climate change, the national weather bureau has said. An average temperature of 16.5°C makes the summer of 2026 the warmest in the UK since records began in 1884, the Met Office said in its provisional figures on Tuesday.

It was also one of the sunniest summers since 1910 featuring the third-driest July on record – with England recording its driest July when drought was declared across half the country. The hot summer followed a record-breaking heatwave in late spring. June was the second-warmest on record in Britain and it was followed by the second-warmest July. A spate of rain in late August cooled temperature figures for that month.

It was the consistency of the warmth throughout the season that resulted in a new UK summer mean temperature record provisionally being set, exceeding the record set last year by 0.4°C. “The conditions we’ve seen this summer have broken UK climate records once again,” said Dr Amy Doherty, who leads the National Climate Information Centre at the Met Office.

“These records are now breaking with increasing frequency, reflecting the influence of human-induced climate change on the temperatures we’re experiencing in the UK. Particularly notable is how much we’ve exceeded the previous summer mean temperature record, set just last year.”

For decades, the UK's hottest summer was in 1976, when the country baked under extreme heat and drought that drove up food prices. The famous summer of 1976 has now been reduced to the seventh-hottest on record. The five warmest summers have each occurred since 2003, with the highest temperatures coming this year and last.

Average daytime temperatures this year were also the hottest on record, surpassing those of 1976. The highest temperature of this summer was 38.1°C at Kew Gardens, London, recorded on August 13. Lingwood in Norfolk set a new daily temperature record for June, when it reached 38.0°C. A total of 54 Met Office weather stations broke their daily maximum temperature record this summer.

Summers like this would occur naturally only once in more than 1,000 years in a climate unaffected by the greenhouse-gas emissions, Met Office scientists have warned. Their analysis found the record-breaking summer was made around 130 times more likely because of human-induced climate change, utilizing a peer-reviewed method that analyses computer simulations.

“The summer of 2026 has been remarkable and is an example of the extremes we can expect to see more frequently as a consequence of human-induced climate change,” said Dr Mark McCarthy, head of climate attribution at the Met Office. “In our current climate, which is changing because of the effect of burning of fossil fuels, we should now expect this to be about a one-in-nine-year event.”

This warming trend is expected to continue as the global average temperature increases in response to emissions of greenhouse gases. Met Office climate scientists also analysed this summer against global climate-change projections, noting that summers are expected to become both hotter and drier in the future.