Now ‘one in ten summers to be as hot as 2018’

THE record-breaking heat of 2018 will soon be a regular occurrence, according to the Met Office.

Last summer was the joint-hottest on record with 2006.

But such weather could soon be much more common – with a one in ten chance of such a scorching summer in any given year, research by the Met Office suggests.

The years 2018, 2006, 2003, 1976 and 1995 make up the top five warmest summers for UK mean temperature from 1884.

Part of the explanation for the heat of recent years has been high sea-surface temperatures close to the UK, movement of the jet stream winds in the Atlantic, and high pressure fronts across Europe.

But experts said that additional warming from climate change also had a role.

Dr Mark McCarthy, of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre and lead author of a new paper in the Royal Meteorological Society journal Weather, wrote: ‘The UK has always endured weather extremes, including heatwaves, and there is no doubt that summer 2018 would always have been a notable period.’

However, he added: ‘Our study found that climate change also added to the intensity, making it an even more dramatic year.

‘Bringing together multiple strands of evidence from observations and numerical simulations, our analysis shows that a UK summer temperature comparable to extreme summers like 2018 or 1976 now has a likelihood of 11-12 per cent of occurring in any given year, which is 30 times more likely than would be expected from natural factors alone.’

The latest Met Office projections of future UK climate change suggest that these summer temperatures could be normal by the 2050s. The Met’s research paper observes that the northern hemisphere summer of 2018 saw high temperature records being challenged or broken across parts of western Europe, central Asia and North America.