The Central England Temperature series
The Central England Temperature (CET) series is the longest running instrumental temperature series in the world.
The UK is warming. We know this from our collection of official weather data that have been monitoring UK-wide temperatures from 1884 and form part of the HadUK-Grid dataset; our definitive source of information for monitoring the UK’s climate. However, historical observations extend much further back than this.
The Central England Temperature (CET) series is the longest-running instrumental temperature series in the world. The key value of this dataset is therefore the long-term context on climate change it provides. By collating and combining early instrumental records, the series charts monthly temperature statistics from 1659. The series is representative of a region enclosed by Lancashire, London and Bristol.
Cooler and warmer spells
When looking at the series you can clearly see cooler and warmer spells, but none of these periods have been as marked as the warmer-than-average period since the late 20th Century. In a series that tracks over 360 years of temperature, the more recent years dominate the top ten warmest as clear evidence of our changing climate. The last time there was a year in the top ten coldest was in 1879 during the reign of Queen Victoria.
The CET today
The present-day CET is calculated from stations located at Stonyhurst (Lancashire), Rothamsted (Hertfordshire), and Pershore (Worcestershire), but a number of weather stations and early archive records of personal measurements have been used to construct the series over time.
While the CET holds an important place in climate records due to its longevity, HadUK-Grid, which dates back to 1884 for temperature, is our definitive dataset for monitoring the UK climate. HadUK-Grid is informed by thousands of observations which are interpolated onto a 1km x 1km grid of the UK to provide consistent coverage, even as individual stations open and close over time.
Further information
This page provides an introduction to the Central England Temperature series. More detail on how this fits into our wider observational evidence for climate change can be found on our UK Climate Datasets webpage and in our State of UK climate report. More details on CET and its construction, and access to the data can be found on this Met Office Hadley Centre datasets webpage.
The climate misinformation you may encounter
- Misinformation: The Met Office keep adjusting the Central England Temperature record to exaggerate climate change
Our response: The Met Office maintains the Central England Temperature series and we have a process of continual review and improvement to ensure the dataset is robust. This can result in occasional updates to the series. We do this transparently by publishing our results.
To take account of changes in technology and the weather station network over time requires a careful process of adjusting the contributing data to produce a consistent series. This was an effort first undertaken by British climatologist Gordon Manley and was published in a paper to the Royal Meteorological Society in 1952 with the aim of producing a multi-century series to monitor climate change in the UK.