An office worker carries a large fan in central London on July 12, 2022. The Met Office issued a Red Extreme Heat Warning for parts of the country on Friday.
Yui Mok | PA Images | Getty Images
The UK issued a “Red Extreme” heat warning on Friday, with authorities saying temperatures could potentially reach 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) next week.
In a statement, the Met Office said the warning will cover parts of east, south-east, central and northern England on July 18 and 19.
“Extreme, perhaps record-breaking temperatures are likely to emerge early next week, quite widely in the red warning zone on Monday and focused a little further east and north on Tuesday,” said Paul Gundersen, chief meteorologist at the Met Office.
“Right now there’s a 50% chance we’ll see temperatures above 40°C and an 80% chance we’ll see a new maximum temperature reached,” Gundersen said.
Friday’s new heat warning came on the same day that the UK’s Health Safety Agency issued a level 4 heat and health warning for England. The warning is in effect between midnight on Monday and midnight on Wednesday next week.
According to the Met Office, Level 4 means a national emergency and occurs “when a heatwave is so severe and/or prolonged that its effects extend beyond the health and social care system”.
“At this level, disease and death can occur among the fit and healthy, not just the high-risk groups,” he adds.
People have been advised to take a number of measures to cope with the heat. They include:
- Care for young children and babies, the elderly and people with accompanying health problems.
- Close curtains in rooms facing the sun.
- Dress appropriately for the weather.
- Avoiding excess alcohol.
- And drinking “lots of fluids.”
The UK’s record high temperature was 38.7 degrees Celsius. This was achieved on 25 July 2019 in Cambridge.
Parts of the UK have experienced unseasonably hot weather in recent days, with an extreme heat warning already in place between July 17 and 19 for much of England and Wales.
“Temperatures are expected to start to return closer to normal for the time of year from the middle of next week onwards as cooler air sweeps across the country from the west,” the Met Office said.
In January 2022, the World Meteorological Organization stated that 2021 was “one of the seven warmest years on record”. The WMO based its finding on the consolidation of six international datasets.
In a statement at the time, the WCO said global warming and what it called “other long-term climate change trends” were “expected to continue as a result of record levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Back in the UK, Nikos Christidis, climate attribution scientist at the Met Office, said climate change “has already affected the likelihood of temperature extremes in the UK”.
“The chances of us seeing 40°C days in the UK could be up to 10 times more likely in the current climate than in a natural climate unaffected by human influence,” Christidis added.
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