July 3, 2023

expert reaction to press release from the Met Office about June temperature record and whether it’s attributable to climate change

The Met Office press release states that it was the hottest UK June on record.

Dr Richard Hodgkins, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography, Loughborough University, said:

“One of the notable aspects of the warm June, is how well it fits expectations of a changing climate in the UK.  Researchers have been predicting more “stuck” weather patterns for some time, which in summer would mean longer heatwaves.  What happened this year was somewhat like a typical weather event for the UK, but stretched out in time much longer than normal.  This year, easterly winds that sometimes bring warm, continental air to the UK for a few days at a time, instead lasted for weeks (at the Loughborough University weather station, winds blew from the east continuously from 25 May to 19 June).  The driver of this event was the jet stream, high in the atmosphere, which usually shifts about regularly and gives the UK the changeable weather we know so well.  In this case, an unusual build up of heat over the North Atlantic caused the jet stream to “stick” in a state that allowed warm, easterly air to dominate the UK.  In a warmer climate, this is very much the sort of pattern we’d expect to see more often, and if it occurred in the warmer months of July or August, it could lead to extreme heat conditions, with health risks for outdoor workers, the elderly and the vulnerable, together with increased wildfire risks and drought.

“In terms of attributing the record June temperatures to climate change, it’s difficult to assess the data in the absence of the actual study, but the Met Office are world leaders in this.  Breaking the record by almost a whole degree is statistically very unlikely in the absence of climate change – records usually creep up by small fractions of a degree.  The UK is one of the best-monitored places in the world meteorologically, so we can be confident in the data.

“For comparison, recent attribution studies for extreme floods in the DR Congo and Rwanda concluded that the contribution of climate change couldn’t be determined, because there weren’t enough weather station data to be confident in the results.”

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2023/fingerprints-of-climate-change-on-june-temperature-records

Declared interests

Dr Richard Hodgkins: “No conflicts of interest.”