Climate
The UK’s hottest years are also shining through
This post comes off the back of a classic “is summer here?” kind of weekend — park run, paddle boarding, cycle ride with pub stop & a BBQ… the lot. Just enough to make you think the UK weather might finally be on our side.
This post comes off the back of a classic “is summer here?” kind of weekend — park run, paddle boarding, cycle ride with pub stop & a BBQ… the lot. Just enough to make you think the UK weather might finally be on our side.
So I threw the UK mean temperature dataset from the met office at my ChatGPT prompt.
The heat is on….
2025 is sitting right at the top of the UK’s annual mean temperature table, but what really stands out is what’s around it. It’s not a one-off, recent years are all crowded up at the top 🤔.
Whilst UK annual mean temperature data is interesting, I fancied a dive into the sunshine dataset ☀️.
Focusing on the East Anglia sunshine stats 2025 wasn’t just warm — it was bright too 😎.
The region recorded 1,989.6 hours of sunshine. That’s comfortably above recent standouts like 2022 and even older peaks like 2003 — and well above the long-run average of about 1,554 hours.
Warm, bright, and 🩳’s at the ready
The temperature story is about a pattern, those recent years showing up again and again at the top (nothing new really….global warming).
The sunshine story is a bit different. 2025 really stands out on its own, with a particularly bright spring doing a lot of the work.
Put the two together and it starts to feel a bit more real. This wasn’t just another warm year in a dataset — last year really did get off to a sunnier start, I’ll be interested to see what 2026 looks like comparatively.
TL;DR
2025 tops the UK temperature rankings — and in East Anglia, it was one of the brightest years on record too.
Same year. Two signals.
👋🏻
Adam
#coffeetableviz — simple charts, clear stories.
First published on the original coffeetableviz WordPress site.