UK Summer 2022: Mean Temperature was Hot, but not THAT Hot

Posted on by

The Met Office has announced that summer 2022 was, with 2018, the joint hottest in England on record.

Wanstead Meteo has also tweeted that summer 2022 was the warmest on record in east London.

Fig 1 Screen grab of Wanstead Meteo tweet

All this is slightly odd, because the Central England Temperature series shows 1976 to have been the hottest summer, followed by 1826, although recent summers such as 2018 and 2022 have also been notably hot.

Fig 2 CET mean summer temperatures, graph by Tim Joslin from Met Office data (legacy data used except for May-Aug 2022, which is thus provisional data)

The most recent 5 year period, 2018-2022, averaged the hottest summers of any such period since 1659, and the same is true of the most recent 11 year (2012-22) and 21 year (2002-2022) periods. That’s global warming for you.

But summer 2022 wasn’t freakish, that is, exceptional compared to summers of the time.

Fig 3 Summer mean CET (top) and deviation (lower) of mean CET from 21 year mean centred on the year, 1859-2022, graph by Tim Joslin from Met Office data (legacy data used except for May-Aug 2022, which is thus provisional)

The lower graph (green) in Fig 3 shows that the mean temperature in summer 1976 was 2.35C higher than the mean temperature for summers 1966-1986, whereas the mean summer temperature in 2022 was only 1.18C hotter than the mean for summers 2002-2022, the latest available, so assuming (conservatively) that the future summers (2023-2032) are only as hot as the mean for 2002-2022.

Assuming summer mean temperatures are still as variable as they have been for the last few centuries, there is clearly potential in our warmer world for a UK summer with a mean temperature over 1C warmer than in 2022!