State of the UK Climate 2023

Oral Presentation

I will present some key findings from the State of the UK Climate 2023 report. This annual report by the Met Office National Climate Information Centre (NCIC) presents recent observations from the UK’s weather station network in the context of the most recent decade, long-term averages and full climate series. The report is based mainly on the HadUK-Grid dataset at 1km resolution, maintained by the NCIC team. The report will also include contributions from the National Oceanography Centre on sea level rise, and ‘citizen science’ phenology data from the Woodland Trust. 

Every year the weather in the UK is different. Events in 2023 included an exceptionally warm June which smashed previous records, a notable early September heatwave, and a run of named storms through the autumn and early winter which caused significant weather impacts, particularly flooding. These included Babet – for which the Met Office issued two red warnings for rain – Ciaran – a ‘near miss’ to the south – and culminated in Gerrit and Henk in late December and early January 2024. 

The UK’s climate is changing, fast. With 2022 and 2023 the UK’s two warmest years on record, the influence of climate change on our long-running observational records is stark. 2023 was also the first year in which 4 separate months were in the top-ten wettest for their respective monthly series for the UK overall. I will show how climate change is particularly influencing the occurrences of extremes of temperature and how it has changed occurrences of records within our national series. If time permits, I may also briefly describe any notable (and as yet unknown) weather events of 2024. 

Mike Kendon is a climate information scientist at the Met Office National Climate Information Centre (NCIC). He is the lead author for the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate reports, published annually by the Royal Meteorological Society in the International Journal of Climatology since 2017. He works with colleagues to maintain and develop the UK climate monitoring capability based on observations from the land surface network of weather stations, and in particular the HadUK-Grid dataset. His work involves software development, data analysis and science communication.