Yesterday the UK recorded its warmest ever January temperature: 19.6°C at Kinlochewe.
Kinlochewe is a village in NW Scotland, about halfway between Skye and Inverness. It sits at the head of a loch and is also surrounded on three sides by mountains, so is precisely the sort of place where the Föhn effect might boost temperatures on a windy day. The high temperature was a very localised phenomenon - only the northwestern coast of the Highlands topped 15°C, and the east coast barely scraped double figures. But it's still extraordinary to hit almost 20°C in January, and it's not the local geography that's changed, it's the climate.
More extraordinarily yesterday didn't just exceed the previous record, it smashed it. The previous January maximum was 18.3°C, a temperature jointly recorded in 1958, 1971 and 2003, and this is 1.3°C warmer. A change of this magnitude shouldn't normally happen. It's similar to what happened in July 2022 when Coningsby recorded 40.3°C, the UK's highest ever temperature, beating the previous record of 38.7°C by over a degree and a half.
I thought I'd look back at the years in which the UK's monthly temperature records were last broken. For July that's 2022 and for January that's now 2024. Here's the full list.
When the UK maximum monthly temperature record was last broken
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2024
2019
1968
1949
1944
1976
2022
2003
1906
2011
2015
2019
Years in the last decade are underlined. There are five of these, i.e. almost half our monthly records have been broken in the last 10 years. Every month from November to February has been upgraded since 2014, suggesting that winter extremes are being affected more than summer extremes.
When the UK minimum monthly temperature record was last broken
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
1982
1956
2018
1917
1979
1975
1978
1964
1915
1973
1919
1995
Years in the last decade are underlined. There's only one of these, indeed the monthly minimum temperature record has only been broken once this century. Look more carefully and you'll see it's only been broken twice in the last 40 years, whereas in the same period the record for maximum temperature has been broken seven times.
In summary, when it comes to monthly temperature records we've been breaking a lot more maxima than minima recently. It doesn't prove the climate is heating up, not in itself, but it is self-evidently the direction of travel you'd expect if it was. I wonder which monthly record will fall next?
