i will report on 2022 s biggest storms and look at what happens after weather disaster strikes. i am at raf coningsby, not only a place very close to my heart in that it is where i began my forecasting career, but to british meteorology it s a very important place, because this july at this very stevenson screen, we recorded the uk highest temperature of 40.3 celsius. good evening. it has been a day of record breaking temperatures across the uk. more than a0 celsius for the first time. july the 19th, the uk s hottest day, but as temperatures soared after the driest start to the year since 1976, drought and fire resulted. here in wennington in east london,
hailed as a hero as he used his bulldozer to dig a trench to stop a fire from spreading. although he escaped the flames alive, he suffered severe burns and tragically died from his injuries in october. figures show the number of excess deaths reported during the heatwaves in spain, france, germany and the uk numbered more than 20,000. raf coningsby is home to front line combat ready squadrons protecting uk airspace whatever the weather, so it s crucial they get the most accurate forecast. so here we are in the met office forecast office. it s 20 years since i ve been in this particular room. it has changed a little bit. in the chair where i used to once sit is our forecaster today, alice summerfield. you were here on that day back injuly when we saw the temperature of 40.3 celsius recorded here in coningsby. what was it like to see that here? it was something that was never expected in the uk.
in november, during the night, mud surges towards the sea, taking everything with it after several days of intense downpours. in october, on the greek island of crete, cars were swept into the sea by a powerful flood that locals say caught them by surprise, also at night, after a day of rain. brazil endured rounds of severe storms that caused deadly flash flooding. this is the aftermath of a landslide that swept onto a motorway in early december and here in petropolis in february, over 200 people died in a catastrophic mudslide that followed several hours of torrential rain. still to come on weather world, the science behind storm surge, as hurricane ian wreaks havoc in florida. welcome back to raf coningsby. this base has a special place in my heart, because it is where i started forecasting and it is of course the place where the highest uk temperature ever was recorded this summer, 40.3 celsius. behind me are some of the typhoon
and here at coningsby it was even more incredible and remarkable because our previous max temperature was nowhere near, i think we beat it by about 5.5 degrees on that day, so it was extreme for the uk as a whole and even more extreme for the local area. at what point did you realise that coningsby was going to be the hottest place ever recorded in the uk? it has to go through quite vigorous quality control before we actually officially get the record, so obviously by the evening, we were pretty sure no one was going to beat us, beat that 40.3 record, but we actually were not officially holding the uk record until a few days later when they came and did the quality control on the obs equipment outside. as a forecaster, i did not think i would see 40 celsius this soon here in the uk. do you think we will see that again anytime soon? we know it is possible to reach that, so it definitely can happen again and it is something that is going to be increasingly likely with the effects of clim
question, isn t it? when we look at these records here, these are from durham observatory back in 1890, and it can be quite difficult to read at times, but they were very systematic and careful. when we think about observations, we think about how they are used for weather forecasting, for the weather forecast we generate in the met office, there are observations coming in from a huge load of sources and of course observations are also very important to understand our climate and if we want to understand our climate of the future, the first step is we need to understand our climate now and we also need to understand our climate going back into the past. so we have got all of those standardised and scientifically robust observations, just like the 40.3 from coningsby earlier this year. how has that fed into models to create a bigger picture on a wider scale of what is happening to our climate? we calculate values across the whole of the uk and if we calculate an average of all those poi