- 7 weeks ago
This is an in-depth Met Office discussion. Summer 2026 was a truly exceptional summer. A once in a lifetime event. Or was it? Could we experience a summer like this again in our current climate? Could a summer as hot and dry as this be a typical summer in a warmer world? Bringing you this deep dive is Met Office meteorologist Aidan McGivern and Climate Scientist James Pope.
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00:00Summer 2026 was the hottest summer on record, but could it soon be surpassed?
00:06Do we need to adapt to more summers like 2026 in the future?
00:12Could there even be hotter summers like this?
00:16Welcome to the Met Office Deep Dive, our regular in-depth look at the UK's weather and beyond.
00:21We do these every Tuesday.
00:23If you enjoy these kinds of extended forecasts, please don't forget to hit subscribe, send us a comment, a question.
00:28We like to answer those on the Weather Studio Live on a Friday and hit the like and tell your
00:33friends about it as well.
00:34This week, I'm pleased to say I'm joined once again by James Pope, climate scientist at the Met Office, becoming
00:40a regular on the Deep Dive,
00:42because his work is so integral to putting current weather into the context of the changing UK climate.
00:49And this week, I really wanted to chat to James about how the summer that we've just experienced,
00:56the hottest summer on record, such an extraordinary three months of weather,
01:01how that fits into climate projections for the UK.
01:06Is it the type of summer we're going to now expect in the years and decades to come?
01:11Welcome along, James.
01:13Thanks, Aidan.
01:13So, this, just to remind people, I know we've covered it extensively in the Deep Dive, I won't go into
01:18the nitty-gritty.
01:19This is a map showing the mean temperature anomalies to the day and night temperature of the summer that's just
01:24gone.
01:25And, as we all know, it has been the hottest summer on record.
01:28Hottest summer on record for every county across England, Wales, Northern Ireland, some counties in southern Scotland.
01:33But we had this north-west-south contrast across the UK, two degrees above average there.
01:40But some parts of southern England had a maximum temperature anomaly of more than three degrees above average.
01:47This is the rainfall.
01:47Of course, it was an exceptionally dry summer, not the driest summer on record,
01:52but very dry across a large part of the UK, with the exception of north-west Scotland.
01:56So, this kind of summer, hot and dry, exceptionally hot for many parts of the UK,
02:04way above anything we've experienced before, is it what we can expect in the years to come?
02:10Now, we showed these in last week's Deep Dive, and we also published a press release that had these figures
02:19in them.
02:19So, we're going to talk a little bit about these,
02:21but James has come along to share some other plots that put these graphs into perspective.
02:27Can you explain what's going on here, James?
02:30Yeah, of course, Aidan.
02:30So, what we've got here, we've got three different, we call them violin plots because of that lovely shape they've
02:36got.
02:37And they're representing a two-degree warmer world, a two-and-a-half-degree warmer world, and a three-degree
02:41warm world.
02:42What I mean by that is that world is warmer than the pre-industrial,
02:45and it's a 20-year window inside the climate model, which is, on average, at that temperature.
02:52We've got 16 different ensemble members, so 16 different versions of the model within UKCP,
02:58the UK Climate Projections Local, so that model is at a very high resolution.
03:03At the time, it was comparable to what was being used for the Met Office's weather forecasting back in 2018
03:08when these were run.
03:11And we have 20 years of each across 16 ensemble members, so we have 320 summers in each of these,
03:17and we're able to look at every summer's average temperature and then plot it out with the little black line
03:23you can see representing that mean.
03:25So, the ensemble mean, the average over all of those models in that window against the temperature.
03:30And this is the summer that we've just experienced, so close to 16-and-a-half-degree mean temperature across
03:36the whole of the UK.
03:38And we can see how it compares with the distribution of those summers in those future climates, can't we?
03:45Exactly. So, what you can see is the red line is quite noticeably above the mean for this two-degree
03:50warmer world,
03:51which is a little under 16 degrees.
03:55It's marginally above the average in a two-and-a-half-degree world,
03:58but it is a bit below the average in the three-degree warm world, which is much closer to 17.
04:02So, what we're essentially saying is here that in the future, the summer we've just had,
04:08which is undoubtedly extreme, our hottest summer we've seen to date,
04:13actually is an average summer for a global level of warming somewhere between two-and-a-half to three,
04:19probably about 2.8 degrees Celsius of global warming above the pre-industrial.
04:24And that's average.
04:25And so, it's two degrees warmer, two-and-a-half and three degrees.
04:28What's the current global warming level in our current climate?
04:33Roughly, and it's hard because obviously it's a moving goalpost,
04:37it's somewhere around 1.3 to 1.4 degrees warmer than it was in the pre-industrial,
04:42which we define as being the period from 1850 to 1900.
04:46OK. So, when we talked about the summer stats that we've just published,
04:50we talked about this summer being a one-in-nine-year summer.
04:56So, a return period in our current climate of one-in-nine.
04:59And that compares to a pre-industrial climate of a global warming level of zero,
05:05of more than a thousand years.
05:07So, the summer, like the one we've just experienced, occurring once every thousand years or more.
05:12Now, it's one-in-nine.
05:13So, it's still a hot summer in our current climate,
05:16but what you're saying is it eventually becomes a fairly typical summer.
05:21Yeah. We would expect a summer like what we have just seen every other year or so, you know, on
05:27average.
05:27With half the summers being hotter.
05:30Yes. And within that, levels of extreme.
05:33Those are the temperatures.
05:34This is the same thing, but with rainfall.
05:36So, everything's shifted then to the left, or at least as the planet warms,
05:41everything becomes shifted to the left, right?
05:43So, here we have two degrees, a lot below the average amount of rainfall you'd expect in the summer.
05:49And again, more or less beautifully splitting the difference between the three-degree warmer world
05:53and the two-and-a-half-degree warmer world.
05:56One of the things to point out on this figure is you can see that the two-degree window
06:01is much narrower than the two-and-a-half and three.
06:04And one of the things we know from the projections is that as we get these warmer summers,
06:10one of the things that can occur is very, very intense, short durations of hourly scale, massive thunderstorms.
06:19So, you think back to central London, 2023-ish, when there was, you know,
06:23100 millimetres of rain falling over a couple of hours, lots of surface flooding,
06:27images of water cascading into certain tube stations, but also very, very localised.
06:32So, very, very narrow areas.
06:33So, there were parts of London that saw on that day no rainfall and just had a beautiful sunny day.
06:39And other places where it was ankle-deep water in the streets of London.
06:44And what you're saying is because the resolution of the models that you're looking at,
06:48they allow convection.
06:49So, they're high enough resolution that they've got showers and thunderstorms in them,
06:54not just frontal rainfall.
06:56What I found interesting, look at these, is that, yeah, on average, these summers are getting drier.
07:01But look at the tail.
07:03So, the extreme dry over here on the left and then the extreme wet over here on the right.
07:08And actually, in a three-degree world, the tail of extreme wet summers extends beyond the cooler global warming scenarios.
07:18Yeah, and very much you could believe in this sort of summer that some areas would get really high deluges
07:25of very intense summer rainfall.
07:27And other areas might see almost nothing at all because of the nature, you know,
07:31you can imagine a band of thunderstorms that cuts through sort of the southeast, south of London,
07:35and a band of thunderstorms that the next week goes through sort of the Midlands, through Birmingham.
07:40And so, the M4 corridor, a place like Reading and Swindon, see nothing at all because each band has gone
07:46either side of them.
07:47And that sort of noisiness comes out in this future projection.
07:50We do see that with rainfall projections that there can be an element of noise to the way they come
07:57out of the simulations.
07:58And this summer, when you look at how it played out, first 10 days of June, really quite wet.
08:04Last 10 days or so of August, also wet.
08:08In between, that's when we had, for example, at Wisley, 62 days of consecutive dry.
08:13And places like Kew Gardens, no rain at all in July.
08:17And barely any rain for southern England in July.
08:20So, this summer, yeah, really long and intense dry period with the various heat waves, but bookended by some wet
08:29weather.
08:30And so, it didn't end up being one of the driest summers on record.
08:34And looking at this, you know, when you think about what a wet summer might look like in a three
08:41degree world,
08:41is that like a 2012 kind of summer where it's weather front, weather front, weather front, just constant kind of
08:48wet weather?
08:49Or is it a year in which you still have long dry periods interspersed by some heavy, lively thunderstorms and
08:58things like that?
08:58It's much more in the latter.
09:00It's much more thinking about big, intense convection, thunderstorms, small spatial areas,
09:06but quite high intensities of rainfall, rather than you sort of, yeah, that sort of dirge of frontal systems,
09:12which is what our projections show we should expect more of in the winter.
09:15Right.
09:16Let's move on to some of the nitty gritty here and where those plots came from.
09:22It'll take a bit of getting used to what these graphs show, but they are really, really informative.
09:27Here we've got temperature along the bottom.
09:30So, increasing temperature, mean temperature, though, so day and night temperature average over the summer
09:34and over the UK as a whole.
09:36Same on the left there.
09:37That's the precipitation.
09:39And these black dots show what we've seen, don't they?
09:431975 to 2024.
09:44Yeah.
09:45So, these are the actual observed summers.
09:47And you can see, so these were produced by a member of my team, Daniel Cubbon.
09:50And you can see he's picked out a couple of summers.
09:52We've got 2022 is in here.
09:54And obviously, 1976 is down here.
09:56I suspect 1975 is the dot quite close to it as well.
10:00And this represents that sort of range of summers.
10:02So, I think you've also just highlighted –
10:03I think that was 2012.
10:06We think that's 2012.
10:06The wettest one, yeah.
10:08And you can see there's a spread.
10:10And then were the dashed lines here cross is what we've just seen.
10:14So, you can really see how it stands alone in terms of its mean temperature.
10:21And only a handful of summers were drier than it.
10:24Yeah.
10:26Now, when you took the model simulations, initially, you took the current climate, right?
10:33And that's what these green dots show.
10:35Yeah.
10:35So, 16 ensemble members, 20 years in each ensemble, so 320 summers.
10:40And these have all been plotted as the green lines.
10:43And you can see that the model sometimes has some cooler than have happened in the real world,
10:48this sort of space here.
10:49And then there are some that are simulated to be warmer than what we've seen in the real world.
10:54But generally speaking, you can see that sort of the bulk of what we've got here is where the black
10:59dots are.
10:59So, we're sort of – we are – you know, the model is capturing very nicely what we've seen in
11:04our current climate.
11:05There are more summers than have – there are more simulated summers than there have been actual summers.
11:09So, you do expect some spread.
11:11But you can really see that the models – I like this plot because I think it does show that
11:15we're getting our model is pretty close to what we'd expect.
11:20So, this is a good way of seeing if what the model projections for the future are showing are broadly
11:26correct because you're comparing it with reality.
11:29And a huge part of any of the client modelling that we do across all the teams that do it
11:33here at the Met Office and also globally is what we call model validation.
11:38Actually checking that the client models can simulate what's actually happening in the here and now, in our current climate,
11:46against a range of metrics.
11:47This is obviously just temperature and precipitation.
11:49An actual proper model validation includes a huge array of variables higher in the atmosphere, in the ocean.
11:55A huge, a huge, a huge band.
11:57But for just what we're looking at today, temperature precipitation, just in the UK, I am – yeah, I think
12:02that's a really nice, really neat validation.
12:04And it is possible, by the looks of it, to get a suburb that's hotter and drier in our current
12:09climate than we've just experienced.
12:11Yeah, so the attribution study that you've mentioned was a 1 in 9.
12:15For us, it's about a 1 in 8.
12:16So, they're subtly different models that have gone into those two different – and with different methodologies.
12:21We were not doing an attribution study when we ran these models.
12:24We were just doing a long 100-year climate projection, but we're – yeah, we're a 1 in 8, so
12:29we're very, very close to what's been observed in the actual attribution study as well, which is nice.
12:35So, this is the current climate, and I'm going to switch to a global warming level of 2 degrees to
12:41see whether or not these dots shift to the right and shift downwards.
12:47So, downwards shift would indicate drier, shift to the right would indicate hotter summers.
12:53Here we go.
12:53So, there's a subtle shift, isn't there?
12:56Yeah, yeah.
12:56You can sort of narrow see these cooler and wetter summers have now lost some dots behind them, and there's
13:02more dots, particularly actually just below in terms of temperature and just above in terms of rainfall where we currently
13:09are.
13:09So, again, that dashed line hasn't moved.
13:11That's this summer.
13:12And I think that, for me, is the reference point.
13:14As we work through these figures, I think, use this dashed line as the reference point and see how the
13:17dots move relative to that line to get an idea of where we sit and where we sit in terms
13:23of the projections.
13:24Global warming level of 2 degrees, in other words, you've got – you've still got more hot – you've still
13:28got more cooler summers, more wetter summers than we've just experienced, but they are migrating their way downwards.
13:34Let's switch to a 2.5-degree world, and, again, watch how these dots shift.
13:41It's subtle, but it's there.
13:42It's subtle, yeah, again, a very small shift.
13:44And I guess, yeah, as we said, we think we're about a 1.3 to 1.4.
13:48The green dots actually represent a world that's a bit cooler than that because they were a slightly broader period
13:52of time, so probably closer to 1.1, 1.2 degrees of warming.
13:56So it was a bigger jump from the green to the yellow and now some smaller transition.
14:01But, again, you can see, particularly at the back end, so where the observations are, that strand there is now
14:08the next one that's really changed.
14:10So, round where we've been this summer, not a massive change, but, yeah, this back end or what we've observed,
14:18you know, in our lifetimes, that's what's really drifted away at this point.
14:24Now, we're going to go up to 3 degrees and see how they change.
14:29And we're pretty much looking at this dashed line in the middle of those simulations.
14:34That's the summer that we've just experienced.
14:36Yeah.
14:36When you combine the temperature and the precipitation together for the whole of the UK, it is just subtly below
14:43what you'd expect in a 3-degree world.
14:45And I think that's borne out really nicely.
14:47But you can see the slightly darker shading in here that there's a few more dots that are overlying each
14:54other in this point.
14:55So, that's coming out a bit, but you can really see that it is drifting.
15:00And now, most of what we observed, you know, even some quite extreme summers, you know, 2022 when we had
15:07a 40-degree day, is now quite a bit cooler than the majority of what's being simulated.
15:13When we talk about these global warming levels, what are we actually expecting, say, by the year 2050 and by
15:20the year 2100?
15:22What kind of global warming level are we thinking about?
15:24So, roughly at the moment, I would expect by 2050s, we'll be somewhere around 2, maybe a little bit higher
15:30than 2.
15:322.5, I would say, is sort of, based on sort of the current trajectories, is sort of around about
15:36the mid to late 2050s and then going towards 2060s.
15:41Where we end up in the future is obviously depends on what happens in terms of emissions now.
15:46The United Nations produces an emissions gap report each year.
15:50Last year's report, it comes out late November, early December, said that based on the current pledges governments have made,
15:57we should expect between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees of warming by 2100.
16:01But when they assess where governments are relative to those pledges, they actually project it to be closer to 2
16:08.8 degrees by the end of the century, which is pretty much where our summer of 2026 has sat as
16:15an average.
16:15It's been between 2.5 and 3.
16:172.8 feels like a very sort of middle ground where this year has been and would become an average
16:23summer.
16:24Yeah, so if we follow our current trajectory rather than what we're promising, by the end of the century, what
16:31we've just experienced is an average summer with plenty hotter.
16:35This is 3 degrees, that's just a little bit above that.
16:38And then let's look at an extreme scenario, which, well, we're not expecting to reach, but human behaviour is very
16:47difficult, isn't it, to predict.
16:48So we look at the global warming level of 4 degrees, and there's a big jump.
16:53There's obviously a jump of 1 degree rather than half a degree, but there's a big jump in these dots.
17:00Yeah, so this takes us to a 4 degree world, by which point the summer we've just seen is colder
17:05and wetter than average.
17:07It should be said 4 degrees is unlikely, but this summer, at the start of this summer, the Committee for
17:14Climate Change released the well-adapted UK report.
17:16That was built on top of the fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment, which obviously the Met Office had quite strong
17:21involvement in producing.
17:23And the summary of that is the UK needs to be prepared for 2 degrees of future warming, but that
17:29sensible adaptation planning would consider the admittedly unlikely possibility of a 4 degree world.
17:35So this is what people who are responsible for planning across infrastructure, energy, transport, healthcare, education, agriculture, those sorts of
17:46sectors, they need to bear in mind the possibility, albeit unlikely, but the possibility that this sort of summer could
17:52occur in the future.
17:54And, you know, we've gone through these increments step by step, the changes initially were subtle, then quite big.
18:02If we go back to where we are at currently, current climate, you can see that.
18:08Yeah, exactly. Essentially, the dash line is staying exactly the same, you know, the quadrant sort of shifts.
18:14So essentially, it's almost like we're flipping it, isn't it?
18:16Yeah, you know, that's the best way to sort of view it.
18:18You can cycle through just to see how they move.
18:23They're becoming hotter and drier.
18:26You've still got outliers in every global warming level.
18:29You've still got, you know, UK summers are changeable, right?
18:32We don't have the same, you know, climate every year, the same weather patterns every year.
18:36But you can see that obvious trend kind of.
18:38Yeah. And I think that's the other thing.
18:40It's not, you know, we say that 2026 would be the average summer.
18:42We all know what our current averages are.
18:45We all remember horrible, wet, awful summers where we just can't get outside.
18:49And we all think of, you know, we now have some really strong references for very hot summers.
18:54What we're essentially talking about here is when does what we've seen this summer,
18:57and also really 2025 last year, very similarly, actually become the average of what we can expect.
19:03So that becomes our middle ground so that there are then summers that are more extreme than this summer
19:09because this summer is the average.
19:11So there has to be outliers above that.
19:13Just one final point on that.
19:16And what I found extraordinary was you mentioned 2025 last year was at the time the hottest summer on record.
19:24It was a smidge over 16 degrees mean temperature.
19:28This summer, 0.4 degrees warmer on average.
19:32I think most people noticed a real difference, a real step change this summer.
19:38Heat waves, the scorching ground, the high temperatures consistently through the summer.
19:45That was where, like you say, the needle moved 0.4 degrees.
19:51But in a 4 degree world there, there are some of these up at 18, 20 degrees mean temperature,
19:58which doesn't, you know, bear thinking about, right?
20:01And this could only happen at the very end of this century.
20:04And as we said, it would be unlikely.
20:06But if it did happen, it would be right at the end of the century.
20:08But, you know, for people who've got, you know, young children now, that's, you know,
20:12when they're going to be sort of grandparents.
20:15That's the sort of time frame we're looking at.
20:17So when you think about 2100, I think about when my children are potentially grandparents.
20:22And that's the reference I always like to think about it.
20:25I think, you know, 2050, 2060 is sort of when you become your parents.
20:30And I think about, you know, what age are my children by the end of this century?
20:34And that's how I sort of try and imagine what it would be like for them in that sort of
20:37world.
20:38Yeah. And even in our current lifetimes and when our kids are adults,
20:43this is a kind of typical distribution, isn't it?
20:45A two degree warmer world, typical distribution of summers,
20:49which is markedly different to what we've experienced in our lifetime so far.
20:54Exactly. Yes.
20:55Just to put some regional detail on this, because obviously, actually, before I do this,
21:00going back to that, I forgot about this, but this is really interesting as well.
21:05This is a global warming world of two and a half degrees, which, as you say,
21:09isn't out of the question in a few decades, by the end of the 2050s.
21:15And what we did earlier this summer, some of you might have seen it,
21:20is a forecast for a plausible heat wave in a two and a half degree warmer world.
21:27Talk us through that, because that's a world in which there are plenty of these hotter summers,
21:32isn't there? But also the UK summer that we've just had sits roughly towards the middle.
21:40Yeah. So this is a still shot from within that forecast.
21:43And in this, we deliberately were picking out an extreme summer.
21:47So this is not what the average summer looks like in this warm world.
21:51This is now the extreme.
21:52So, you know, imagine the situation where 2026 is your average.
21:57Well, this is potentially a new extreme.
21:58And we have, you know, temperatures reaching 45 degrees.
22:01This was part of a two-week-long heat wave with five or six days, if memory serves,
22:07with temperatures above 40 degrees somewhere in the country.
22:09But you can, you know, throughout sort of even into Scotland, southern Scotland,
22:13the lowlands are getting 38 degrees.
22:16One of the days in this has, I think, 35, 36 in Aberdeen.
22:20So the whole of the UK, you know, over to Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland,
22:24they're seeing really high temperatures across, you know, across this scenario.
22:27So this is now a new extreme event.
22:29So we think back to when, and I think it was very telling when you recorded that forecast for YouTube,
22:35you actually added in an additional bit at the start,
22:37because we recorded it before the June heat wave.
22:41And the June heat wave sort of almost changed our, some of our perspective and our feeling about that.
22:45Well, this is, you know, this is that sort of heat wave that we saw at the end of June,
22:51but coming through in sort of the late 2050s, early 2060s, in that two and a half degree warmer world.
22:57And in that model, so in those dots, 9% of those summer days in those dots across all of
23:04them,
23:04across the whole ensembles are 40 degrees or warmer.
23:08So, you know, 9% of all summer days across that ensemble has a day where it's 40 degrees somewhere
23:14in the UK.
23:15Wow. And global warming of two degrees, two and a half degrees doesn't sound like much.
23:22If you were to go outside and it's 16 degrees one day and then it's 18 degrees the next day,
23:27it doesn't feel that noticeable.
23:28But it just goes to show you tamper with the global temperature and it produces much bigger extremes.
23:35Yeah. And I think we've all, we've all got that feeling, that sense of when you have a day
23:39and then the next day is, you know, I think this past, the past weekend.
23:42So obviously Saturday was, you know, reasonably typical early September day,
23:46temperature wise, particularly in sort of southern England.
23:48And then Sunday, it was actually noticeably a lot warmer across, you know,
23:53we were out in Corn with the family over the weekend and, you know,
23:56we really noticed Sunday was just that bit warmer and nicer.
24:00And that was a similar sort of like, you know, it was two or three degrees, maybe warmer.
24:03So sometimes you can notice those things, but I think, yeah, it's hard across the averages.
24:07And one of our challenges, I think, when we're communicating the impact of climate change
24:12is going beyond the numbers, 16.5, 2056, RCP this, you know, there's so many numbers thrown around,
24:21but actually what's really important, how we sort of try and communicate
24:24how this impacts on people's lives and how people feel it.
24:27And I think this is where this sort of way we've been putting it in with these charts
24:33helps to illuminate that.
24:34Because if I say to you that 2026, 2025, their average summers in a two and a half degree
24:41or a three degree warmer world, you're then starting to, I think that's a bit more
24:45of an easier message to get.
24:46And then we can put the additional flavor on top of that, that actually there's an extremes.
24:52Every few years you get a heat wave like this.
24:54Not every year, but every few, in that new climate, in 30 years, every few years you get
25:00a heat wave like this.
25:01In this global warming level, in our ensemble, something like a one in 11, one in every 11,
25:07you know, year event sort of would have days, no, not one in every year events, but one
25:13in every 11 days in the model is 40 degrees in summer.
25:16Yeah.
25:17Which is, you know, we've only seen that temperature once so far in the country.
25:23We didn't see it this summer, you know, the highest temperature was 38.1.
25:26So, you know, it really shows that even in a very hot summer like this, we didn't actually
25:31have anything that was especially extreme in terms of our absolute record.
25:36Obviously, monthly records were broken within that.
25:39But in terms of our all time temperature, we didn't see that, obviously.
25:43And of course, I think the other thing about this is we're very much focusing on the UK
25:47here.
25:47The next extension we're thinking about in this is actually how does this look when
25:52you look at sort of the whole of the European domain.
25:54So you bring in, you know, France and Spain, Italy.
25:58Well, they've also seen a lot of extreme temperatures, even by their own averages, and
26:02obviously a lot of devastating events, the wildfires, particularly in Western France in
26:06July.
26:08What's notable here is that it's not just the south, it's the whole of the country.
26:11And of course, there were big regional differences in the summer that we've just experienced,
26:16which is evident when you look at these plots.
26:19We're going to look at Scotland and then we're going to look at southern England, not ignoring
26:23other parts of the UK, just pick the extremes.
26:27But, you know, I think for northern England, Wales, Northern Ireland, it's fair to say that
26:33it's somewhere in between, if not closer to southern England when we're looking at these
26:37plots compared with Scotland.
26:39So again, we've got the observations of the past few decades, and this summer hasn't been
26:46as exceptional for Scotland, has it?
26:48No, so it's the joint sixth warmest, and I think pretty close, 93% I think was the figure
26:54I saw this morning when I was preparing, in terms of the average rainfall.
26:58Yeah, here's the rate.
26:59Oh, the rain was on the other plot.
27:01Beg your pardon.
27:02Let's go back to...
27:03That is where it was the rainfall, right?
27:04Yeah, it was.
27:05The rain's on the y-axis there.
27:08So, you know, you can see that's pretty much splitting the difference between what Scotland's
27:13observed so far.
27:14So, yeah, I think, you know, you've really seen that.
27:17And they said equal sixth warmest, but, you know, that therefore means because of, you
27:22know, even the number of observations we've got here, there's still a lot of much cooler
27:25summers in that, you know.
27:27Yeah.
27:27Equal sixth is record-breaking.
27:29I mean, first, warmest, hottest, that always, you know, sort of, lands, that has a very
27:34sort of measurable hope.
27:35But even when it's the sixth warmest, that's still, you know, anything in the top ten, you
27:40know, that's high numbers, you know.
27:42We've got those sort of 50 years of data.
27:44Yeah.
27:44And it's worth saying, of course, big regional difference across Scotland this summer because
27:49northwest Scotland was wetter than average.
27:51Southern Scotland, some counties had their hottest summer on record.
27:54But looking at how it fits into these future distributions, this is, for starters, this
27:59is the rainfall, isn't it?
28:01Yeah.
28:01So, again, you can really see, if we go back, you think back to those UK figures before and
28:06we were, the difference was between these two black lines.
28:09So, the red line would have been plotting here.
28:10Whereas for Scotland, it's actually marginally wetter than in the average for a global warming
28:18level two world.
28:20So, you've got the green, which was the green dots before, and then the blue, which is the
28:23observations, which are the black dots.
28:25And then, yeah, so this yellow is our two degree warmer world.
28:28And you can see the black line is that middle.
28:30So, anything to the right of the black line is wetter than average summer.
28:35So, you can see the red line sits just under 300 mils of rainfall.
28:40And so, yeah, that would be wetter.
28:41But for Scotland, these distributions don't change much, do they?
28:44They're very subtle for precipitation.
28:46Yeah.
28:47Yeah, it is.
28:47Unlike temperature, which does change a lot more.
28:49Yeah, and I think that probably represents an awful lot about how easy it is for sort
28:55of northwest Scotland, even at this time of year, depending on where the jet stream sits.
28:59It only takes a very subtle shift in the jet stream.
29:02And then sort of northwestern Scotland is a bit more exposed, potentially, to Atlantic
29:06lows that otherwise might have barreled up towards Iceland.
29:09So, they can be a little bit more exposed to those, which allows the rainfall.
29:13But in any situation, that sort of flow, that sort of southwesterly flow of air is always
29:17bringing milder air.
29:19And as that source air mass gets warmer, the temperatures can still change.
29:24So, the rainfall distributions, not as much, but, yeah, the temperature distribution can
29:27really change.
29:28And you can see that.
29:28But again, joint sixth warmest summer on record, but actually marginally cooler than what we'd
29:35expect in a two-degree warmer world for Scotland.
29:38So, Scotland is sort of seeing that slightly cooler than what was sort of the well-adapted
29:42UK report saying the UK needs to prepare for.
29:44The UK, just as a reminder, was between two and a half and three degrees as a typical summer.
29:49Scotland's just under two degrees as a typical summer that we've just experienced.
29:53And for southern England, I'll just go back to here and pick out southern England, which,
29:59as you can see, was a much more exceptional summer.
30:02Drier and hotter, all the other dots of the previous years are to the left and above.
30:08Or not all above, but, yeah, most of them are.
30:12And this is where the summer sits compared with future global warming levels, isn't it?
30:17Yeah.
30:17So, you can see how we've been a lot drier than sort of our average and our present-day
30:21climate.
30:22And you can see that actually, in terms of rainfall, southern England had pretty much
30:27an average summer rainfall amount for a three-degree warmer world.
30:31So, it was just that bit drier.
30:33So, you think for the whole UK, it was about 2.8 degrees of warming.
30:38For just southern England, it's more close to three, which just, you know, shows that
30:42how you think about what we've seen across the south of the UK, this summer, how bare
30:48everything's been.
30:49Certainly, even here in the southwest, where, you know, we've seen my garden turned entirely
30:53brown.
30:54In fact, some bits have not yet recovered, even with the rainfall we've had.
30:57So, you know, you can really see it, actually.
30:59And gardens are a very trivial part of this.
31:01And one thing that stands out here for southern England, some of these tails, for these warming
31:05levels of two and a half and three degrees, they're really quite extreme, aren't they?
31:09So, the bulk of the simulations are drier, but you've got some very wet simulations as
31:15well.
31:15Yeah, there's definitely still those very intense summer simulations, simulations with
31:21those very intense summer rainfalls, as we were touching on earlier.
31:23And that's very much a stronger feature in sort of southern England.
31:27When you think about where we see the bulk of the big summer thunderstorms, those real
31:32high-impact events, they generally more occur over the southern counties.
31:35It should be noted as well that we have slightly fewer, not all of the models get to the four
31:40degree warmer world, so they're not actually don't get hot enough to simulate that.
31:44So, we have slightly fewer summers, which messes around with that distribution a little
31:48bit.
31:48And this is the same thing, but for temperature.
31:50And it's way above present day, isn't it?
31:54Present day observations and the model.
31:57And, again, it's kind of roughly equivalent to a typical three-degree warmer world kind
32:03of summer.
32:03Yeah, exactly.
32:03And just a smidge higher.
32:05And, you know, I think that really stands out.
32:08The other thing I think is really jumping out at me, just looking at it now, so the blue
32:10is, that mean blue line for southern England is probably about 16.1, 16.2.
32:16And our whole UK summer average this year was 16.5.
32:21So, the whole of the UK's average summer temperature was warmer than what would be currently the average
32:29south of England temperature.
32:31Which really then shows why this red line is, you know, up near 19 degrees as an average
32:35temperature.
32:36Wow.
32:36So, you know, that's, you know, a near on three-degree change from the, you know, from
32:40our expected climatology for this part of the UK.
32:44So, yeah.
32:45For the UK, we were talking about a temperature that was somewhere between two and a half
32:49and three.
32:51For southern England, it's closer to three.
32:53And for Scotland, it's closer to two-degree global warming level.
32:58And that, a lot of that's summarised here.
33:02It's our final chart.
33:03And it shows a similar thing, doesn't it, for different levels of warming.
33:07Present day, globe warming two, globe warming two and a half and three degrees.
33:12What do these lines show then?
33:13So, this grey-silver line is what was, in the summer of 2024, it would have been our
33:21hottest summer, which has been either 2018, 2006, or 2003, which all were around 15.7
33:27degrees.
33:28So, they were sort of the joint hottest summers.
33:312025, which is our orange line, that then came along, set the new record, 16.1, so 0.4
33:37degrees warmer than the previous hottest.
33:40And then the red line, which is 2026, has come along and added another 0.4.
33:44So, we've had a 0.8 degree shift in our average over the last two, you know, compared to the
33:49record from where the record was two years ago.
33:52And you can really see how these different summers bracket these different lines, particularly
33:58around two and two and a half degrees.
34:00So, if you think back to what I've said, so the Committee for Climate Change prepare the
34:05UK to be adapted for two degrees of warming.
34:07So, an average summer in two degrees of warming is pretty close to 2018.
34:13So, yeah, which itself was, again, was a very hot, very dry summer.
34:18Parts of the east of England went sort of 40, 50 days without rain.
34:22You know, and the impact you can see from that.
34:262025 is getting closer to two and a half degrees.
34:29So, that's probably somewhere in the order around sort of, you know, 2.4 degrees of warming,
34:34you know, so eyeballing the plot.
34:36But that's sort of in the middle of where that emissions gap report I mentioned has got sort of the
34:42current global pledges.
34:44So, somewhere between 2.3 and 2.5 is what the emissions gap report said.
34:47That orange line, 2025, is pretty much an average summer in those conditions.
34:52If, based on where governments currently stand compared to those pledges, that's 2.8 degrees,
34:59which is pretty close to where we've been this summer, 2026.
35:05So, it really gives an idea of where different summers in terms of what we need to be preparing for.
35:10And, of course, these are the averages within that.
35:13There are going to be extremes.
35:14There will be much hotter than average summers.
35:16There will still, of course, be colder and wetter summers.
35:19But those colder and wetter summers will be not as cold and not as wet as what we've experienced in
35:25the past.
35:26So, while they will feel relative to this average colder than wetter,
35:29our perception will have adjusted over sort of that, you know, period of time, 20, 30 years.
35:34Our perception of what is average will move.
35:36We're really seeing here, it's sort of like a window.
35:40It's like a window into that future, where we're going, what we need to prepare for.
35:45Because many people have experienced, particularly in southern England,
35:49have had children sent home from school or unable to go to school because of the temperatures.
35:54We saw medical equipment failures, hospitals.
35:59There were issues around roads, obviously wildfires,
36:02obviously the horrible wildfires where people lost property,
36:05but also wildfires that damage cropland and impacts on farmers.
36:11There's impacts around subsidence.
36:14And they're all individual effects, but also some of these things also wrap together.
36:18So, if you think about, like, the cold food supply chain,
36:21so that's when you're moving refrigerated goods.
36:23So, food is obviously an obvious one, but also things like medicines.
36:27They have to be refrigerated on the road.
36:29So, if you've got transport disruption, road surfaces breaking down, melting,
36:34wildfires, closing roads,
36:36they have to be refrigerated in those trucks for longer,
36:38which they have to be ready for.
36:41And then they have to be refrigerated at source,
36:43whether that's a supermarket or a hospital or in the distribution warehouse.
36:47So, they're reliant on the energy system.
36:50So, there's an awful lot of interconnectedness.
36:52It's not just about preparing agriculture or preparing healthcare or preparing education.
36:57It's about how we wrap all of these things together.
37:00And, you know, the well-adapted UK report was really driving to that,
37:04that we do need to be planning for a world where 2018 is our average.
37:09But the United Nations emissions gap report would suggest that, really,
37:142025, 2026 is going to be our average.
37:16So, that, you know, that highlights what we need to do and where we need to go.
37:19And that's adaptation.
37:21That's just preparing for what's going to happen.
37:24Because our infrastructure is based on a climate that no longer exists, right?
37:28I mean, when you look at the 70s and 80s,
37:31there were only five days in which the temperature got to 35 Celsius or above.
37:36They all happened in 1976.
37:38Five days in that 20-year period.
37:40When you look at the last 10 years,
37:4235 Celsius has been recorded or exceeded,
37:45I think, about 20, 21 days in the past 10 years.
37:49And it's, I learned this summer that it's those temperatures in the mid-30s and upwards
37:56where impacts really start to escalate in our climate
38:00because it happened so infrequently in the past.
38:03Our infrastructure is based on a climate that didn't experience mid-30s and beyond.
38:08Now we're experiencing those kind of impactful temperatures more frequently.
38:12Yeah, and was also built for a world where our winters were colder, you know.
38:16And you really have to start to think now back to, you know,
38:19it's 16 years since the winter of 2010 when it was, you know, bitterly cold
38:24and we saw massive widespread disruption due to snow.
38:26And our infrastructure was also built for more of those winters.
38:29When these things were being built, winters like those in 1962
38:33would have been fresh in people's memories.
38:35You know, they would have been preparing for those colder extremes.
38:38And essentially now, while we still can see colder winters, while we still can see cooler summers,
38:44we really do now have to be preparing ourselves and being ready for the warmer, wetter winters.
38:49But, you know, you look back at the winter we've just had, it was spectacularly warm,
38:53spectacularly wet compared to average extensive flooding, a lot of disruption.
38:58And then we've had this brutally hot and dry summer.
39:02And that's perhaps, you know, it's shifting and it's this change in the average.
39:06Our average climate is changing.
39:08The climate of, you know, of my mum's generation is gone.
39:15Our climate is these lines.
39:18And, you know, our children's climate is these bubbles.
39:21And I think that's the movement we're going to have to make in our planning.
39:25And that's, you know, part of what we're doing here at the Met Office.
39:27We've got projects like Scalable Climate Services.
39:29We're engaging with a wide range of sectors, energy, finance, infrastructure,
39:35working with them so they can get this information that they need
39:38so that they can make those plans.
39:40And that's, you know, hopefully the whole of the UK can be ready.
39:44And that will have hopefully a positive effect that means that we can weather the storm.
39:48Well, James Pope, really interesting to talk to you about all of this stuff.
39:53Thank you for coming on the Deep Dive.
39:54Thank you very much.
39:55Thank you for joining us for this week's Met Office Deep Dive,
39:57an in-depth look at summer of 2026 and how our summers might change in the future.
40:03I hope you found this conversation interesting.
40:05If you did, don't forget to hit subscribe and follow us for more videos like this.
40:09And, of course, our regular forecasts.
40:11Tomorrow we'll have the 10-day trend, a look at the rest of the week and into next week.
40:16But for now, that's all for me. Bye-bye.
40:18Bye-bye.