Hotter and Hotter UK Springs in the CET

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The late May 2026 heatwave has lifted the mean CET for Spring 2026 above the previous highest – 2025! – which itself exceeded the record set the previous year!

My post last week, Maybe May Be Too Darn Hot discussed the late May 2026 heatwave in the UK. This heatwave had a big effect on the mean Central England Temperature (CET) for May, and thus for the whole of Spring 2026. This spring was hotter than that in 2025 – which I wrote about at the time – which in turn exceeded the previous record breaker – 2024! Here’s my graph:

Fig 1 Spring CET mean temperatures, graph by the author from Met Office data

The running means (green, red and thick black lines) in Fig 1 show that, according to the CET record, UK spring temperatures are now significantly higher than any previous 5, 11 and 21, the last 5 springs being on average over a whole degree C hotter than those in any 5 year period before 1990!

Note the signal in this graph of the “global cooling” period, as I highlighted in my previous post, when average spring temperatures declined from around the late 1940s until about 1980, when warming resumed. This has continued until the present day.