Britain’s armed forces have gone on parade on the warmest Armistice Day on record, according to the Met Office, with the country on track for what could be an unprecedented 11th month of above average temperatures.
Unseasonably high temperatures led to “exceptionally mild” conditions across the UK, the forecaster said, with the record-breaking 19.5C recorded in Myerscough in Lancashire more than a degree warmer than the previous record of 17.8C at Kensington Palace in London.
Records were also broken in Scotland, where the mercury hit 19.1C in Lossiemouth, and Northern Ireland, where temperatures reached 17.4C in Magilligan. Wales was the only UK nation where daily temperature records were not broken.
The record-breaking daytime temperatures came after another set of temperature records were broken overnight, with Northern Ireland and Scotland recording their highest November minimum temperatures, at 14.5C and 14.6C respectively.
“It is unusually mild for this time of year, that’s for sure,” said Simon Partridge, a Met Office forecaster. Normal temperatures for this time of year were 8-9C in Scotland and 9-11C in England, he said. “So we are way, way above where we should be for this time of year.”
The unusually warm weather was “a bit of a one-off” caused by a particular buckle in the jet stream that was bringing warm air in a southwesterly flow from the tropics, said Partridge.
But, he added: “The fact that every month this year has had above average temperatures does hint very heavily that obviously things are moving to a much warmer climate.”
Prof Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, said the unusually high temperatures were a result of natural weather phenomena exacerbated by the effects of the climate crisis.
“Human-induced climate change means that the global average temperatures have increased by 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. So we’ve turned the thermostat on basically, the heat that we have globally,” she said.
Bentley said the warm air flowing from the tropics was interacting with climatic effects caused by mountains in Scotland to help increase the temperatures there. “These things happen from time to time,” she said. “But because we’ve turned that thermostat up, it means that they’re going to be higher temperatures than they would normally be if we didn’t have human-induced climate change.
“So it’s that background temperature. We’ve notched things up by a degree or so, which means that when these weather patterns happen, we are just going to see more extreme high temperatures recorded.”
Dr Radhika Khosla, associate professor at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, described the mild weather as unsettling. “Rising unseasonable temperatures are whispers of much greater and more dangerous impacts of climate change yet to come, and that in many instances are already here,” she said.
