Extreme weather is the new normal, according to the latest Met Office assessment of the UK’s climate, showing how baselines are shifting, records are becoming more frequent, and that temperature and rainfall extremes are usual now.

The latest State of the UK Climate report, published in the Royal Meteorological Society’s International Journal of Climatology, provides insight into the UK’s changing climate.

The report shows how the UK has warmed at a rate of approximately 0.25C per decade since the 1980s, with the most recent decade (2015-2024) 1.24C warmer than 1961-1990. Looking even further back, the Central England Temperature series shows that recent warming has far exceeded any observed temperatures in at least 300 years.

As the UK’s climate warms, it is also becoming wetter, with this report showing that the increase in rainfall is entirely due to an upward trend in the winter half-year (October to March). For 2015-2024 the winter half-year is now 16 per cent wetter than 1961-1990 for the UK.

The report is based on observations from a network of several hundred weather stations, with temperature and rainfall data from these extending back to the 19th Century providing long term context. These data tell us how our climate has already changed here in the UK.

Met Office climate scientist and lead author of the report, Mike Kendon, said: “This pace of change and clustering of consecutive records is not a natural variation in our climate. Numerous studies have shown how human emissions of greenhouse gasses are warming the atmosphere and changing the weather we experience on the ground. Our climate in the UK is now different to what it was just a few decades ago, this is clear from our observations.”

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