Despite a mixed bag of sunshine and showers this bank holiday, the UK could be on track for its warmest spring on record. Recent weeks have been unsettled, but the data reveals consistently above-average temperatures.
The 2024 Spring Bank Holiday weekend looks set to be predominantly bright and showery, although some places will enjoy a dry, sunny day today. However, there will be areas of cloud and persistent rain near the east coast and in the southwest today and in most parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland tomorrow. Temperatures are expected to be close to or slightly above the long-term average for late May. Overall, an ordinary Bank Holiday weekend is in store for most of us—not a washout.
Officially, the highest temperature recorded in the UK during a late May Bank Holiday weekend was a long time ago: 32.8°C at Horsham (West Sussex), Tunbridge Wells (Kent) and Regent's Park (London) on the Monday in 1944. It was relatively common for temperature records to be shared between locations back then, because temperatures were typically rounded to the nearest degree Fahrenheit, rather than recorded to the nearest tenth of a degree Celsius as we see today. It's safe to say that this record will not be challenged during the 2024 Bank Holiday.
In the past decade, the most widespread example of a predominantly warm, dry and sunny late May Bank Holiday was probably in 2018. May 2018 was one of the warmest and sunniest Mays on record for much of the UK, and for much of the country the warmest and sunniest weather coincided exactly with the two Bank Holiday weekends. 2018 was generally a hot, dry, sunny summer, with the sunniest weather generally concentrated between May and July, and some areas went for over 50 days without any measurable rain.
Subsequently, May 2020 was even sunnier, completing what was the sunniest spring on record for the UK, although in 2020 the late May Bank Holiday was relatively mixed, and the really sunny weather set in on the Bank Holiday Monday and lasted through to the beginning of June.
However, most recent late May Bank Holidays have been rather like this one will be – a mixed bag, but not a washout. A notable near-miss, if it's warm sunshine you're after, was in 2012, when late May was generally sunny and warm, but the late May Bank Holiday was moved to 4 June that year, and ironically early June 2012 was predominantly cool and cloudy with some rain in places.
Probably the starkest example of a washout late May Bank Holiday weekend in the 21st century was that of 2007, when there were northerly winds and a depression moved eastwards across southern England, producing an unseasonably cold, dull and wet day with persistent rain and maximum temperatures locally below 7°C. However, the weekend was more ordinary in Scotland and the north of England, generally brighter with scattered showers.
It may not have seemed like a particularly warm spring for many of us, with generally cloudy and wet weather in March and early April, and a cool second half of April, although May has produced more in the way of warm sunshine. However, in the long-running Central England Temperature series, which is based on sets of temperature observations around Lancashire and Oxfordshire going back to 1659, there is a substantial chance of Spring 2024 coming out as the warmest spring on record. The two previous warmest springs in the record were 2011 and 2017 with a mean of 10.3°C. (Note that these figures are the average of the maximum and minimum temperatures – the mean daytime maximum temperature is typically 4 to 5°C higher). May's figure is currently running at 14.2°C, and if it sustains this through to the end of the month, it will be the second warmest May in the series (after the remarkable May 1833, which recorded 15.1°C) and the warmest spring on record overall, with a mean of 10.6°C. In the Met Office's UK temperature series, there is also a fair chance of this spring ending up as the warmest on record.
It has become more common in recent years for record warm seasons to not seem exceptionally warm, because, due to the general warming of the UK climate, sometimes record warmth is achieved mainly via consistently above-average temperatures for much of the time, and a lack of major cold spells. Although the second half of April 2024 was cold by recent standards, we had a colder second half of April as recently as 2016 and 2021. In the 20th century, record seasonal warmth tended to rely more on there being exceptional spells of warm/hot and sunny weather, such as in the warm spring of 1990, which featured exceptional warmth in mid-March and an exceptional heatwave in the first week of May.
Loading recent activity...
