2025 likely to be UK’s hottest year ever recorded – Met Office

This year will be the UK’s hottest year since records began, according to the Met Office, as climate change continues to push temperatures to new levels.

With just over a week to go, the average temperature in the UK during 2025 is expected to reach around 10.05C.

The Met Office says a colder Christmas could affect final figures, but 2025 is likely to surpass the current record of 10.03C set in 2022.

Along with the lack of precipitation, persistent temperatures left the country vulnerable to drought and wildfires in the spring and summer; temperatures rose to 35.8C.

While temperatures naturally vary from year to year, scientists could not be clearer that it is human-caused climate change that is driving the UK’s rapidly warming trend.

Met Office scientist Mike Kendon said longer hot days and nights caused by climate change would pose increased risks to older and vulnerable people.

Mr Kendon told BBC Radio 4’s Today program it would also have an impact on the agricultural sector, affecting what crops farmers can grow in the UK.

By the end of 2025, the 10 hottest years on record in the UK will have all occurred in the last two decades, based on measurements dating back to the late 1800s.

“Anthropogenic [human-caused] Amy Doherty, another climate scientist from the Met Office, said climate change was causing warming in the UK just as it was causing warming around the world.

“What we have seen over the past 40 years and will continue to see is more record breaking, more extremely hot years. […] So what was normal 10 years ago will be normal 20 years ago [relatively] it will be great in the future,” he told BBC News.

The Met Office’s forecast uses temperatures observed up to 21 December and assumes the remaining days of the year follow the long-term December average.

As a result, although Meteorology cannot say for sure that 2025 will be the hottest year, this is the most likely outcome.

This will be the sixth time this century that the UK has set a new annual temperature record, after 2002, 2003, 2006, 2014 and 2022.

“The changes we are seeing are unprecedented in observation records dating back to the 19th century,” Mr. Kendon said.

The expected new record of 2025 was built on the heat that continued throughout the spring and summer.

As we approach Christmas those long, warm, sunny days may seem like a distant memory, but they are both spring And Summer They were the UK’s hottest ever recorded.

Each month from March to August was 2 degrees above the long-term average between 1961 and 1990.

Although temperatures have not reached the 40C highs seen in July 2022, hot spells have occurred repeatedly.

Four separate – albeit relatively short-lived – heatwaves have been declared across much of the country.

The UK Health Safety Agency has also issued several heat-health warnings throughout the summer.

Spring and summer months were also periods when rainfall was low. Spring was particularly dry; It was the sixth driest spring in the UK since 1836.

Lack of precipitation, which caused the soil to dry out along with hot weather, dragged a large part of the country into drought.

official during the summer drought declared by the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales respectively in various regions in England and Wales.

Parts of eastern Scotland have also experienced “significant water shortages”, according to the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency.

Recent rains have eased the situation in much of the country and most regions are now officially drought-free. But in some places water levels are still below average.

“There is a huge deficit that needs to be compensated and this has a huge impact not just on the people who work the land. [and] It’s not about growing food, it’s about our rivers, our groundwater, our drinking water availability,” said Jess Neumann, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading.

He added that repeated fluctuations between droughts and floods make it very difficult for communities to adapt to increasingly extreme weather conditions.

Prolonged dry and hot weather also created ideal conditions for forest fires.

By late April, the area burned by bushfires in the UK had already reached 200 metres. a new annual recordAccording to data from the Global Forest Fire Information System dating back to 2012.

More than 47,100 hectares (471 km2 or 182 square miles) burned during 2025; This surpassed 2019’s previous high of 28,100 hectares.

As the UK continues to warm due to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, scientists expect the UK to experience more extreme weather.

“The conditions people experience will continue to change as they have over the last few years [with] more bushfires, more droughts, more heatwaves,” Dr Doherty said.

“But it will also get wetter during the winter semester, so October to March […] “The rain that falls will fall more heavily and the downpours will fall more heavily, causing the kind of flooding we have seen this year,” he added.

The UK wasn’t alone in experiencing extreme heat this year. The world is heading for the second or third hottest year ever recorded, according to the European Copernicus climate service.

But the international consensus on tackling climate change is also being tested; The United States and some other leading fossil fuel producers are returning to net-zero emissions commitments.

Additional reporting by Justin Rowlatt and Kate Stephens