2025 likely to be UK's hottest year ever recorded – Met Office

2025 likely to be UK's hottest on record, says Met Office Published This year is on course to be the UK's hottest since records began, according to the Met Office, as climate change continues to drive temperatures to new heights. With just over a week still to go, the average UK air temperature across 2025 is on track to end up at about 10.05C. A cooler Christmas could affect final figures, but it is likely that 2025 will edge out the current record of 10.03C from 2022, the Met Office says. Along with a lack of rainfall, the persistent warmth left the country vulnerable to droughts and wildfires through the spring and summer, with temperatures peaking at 35.8C. While temperatures vary naturally from year to year, scientists could not be clearer that human-caused climate change is driving the UK's rapidly warming trend. Longer spells of hotter days and nights driven by climate change will pose an increased risk to elderly and vulnerable people, Met Office scientist Mike Kendon has said. Mr Kendon told BBC Radio 4's Today programme it would also have an impact on the agriculture sector, influencing which crops farmers are able to grow in the UK. By the end of 2025, the UK's 10 warmest years on record will all have taken place in the last two decades, in measurements going back to the late 1800s. "Anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change is causing the warming in the UK as it's causing the warming across the world," said Amy Doherty, another climate scientist at the Met Office. "What we have seen in the past 40 years, and what we're going to continue to see, is more records broken, more extremely hot years [...] so what was normal 10 years ago, 20 years ago, will become [relatively] cool in the future," she told BBC News. The Met Office's projection uses observed temperatures up to 21 December and assumes that the remaining days of the year follow the long-term December average. As a result, the Met Office cannot say with certainty that 2025 will be the hottest year, but it is the most likely outcome. It would be the sixth time this century that the UK has set a new annual temperature record, following 2002, 2003, 2006, 2014 and 2022. "The changes we are seeing are unprecedented in observational records back to the 19th Century," said Mr Kendon. The expected new record of 2025 has been built on persistent heat through the spring and summer. Those long, hot, sunny days may feel like a distant memory as we head towards Christmas, but both spring and summer were the UK's warmest ever recorded. Each month from March to August was more than 2C above the long-term average between 1961 and 1990. And while temperatures may not have reached the peaks of 40C seen in July 2022, hot spells happened repeatedly. Four separate - albeit relatively short-lived - heatwaves were declared across much of the country. The UK Health Security Agency also issued...

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