Climate Change – Monkton Heathfield Weather

Climate change here: what Monkton Heathfield’s weather records show

Climate change sounds like a distant threat or a global average that tells us nothing about the place we live. The charts on this page take the opposite approach: they ask what the data say about Monkton Heathfield specifically.

Where the numbers come from

All the long-term evidence comes from the Met Office HadUK-Grid archive — the same official source used in national climate reports. The grid point that covers this area sits at latitude 51.03, longitude -3.04, just under a kilometre square. Those numbers feed every chart you see here. Our own Davis Vantage Vue station adds day-by-day context, but the climate story is built from the official record.

How to read the tiles

Each chart in the right-hand column covers more than a century, grouped into decades. Decades matter because single years are weather, but decades are climate — one cold January proves nothing either way. The dashed line on each chart is the long-run average, worked out at display time from the data itself, so what you see is what the numbers say, not a curve someone drew on afterwards.

What the record shows

Temperature carries the clearest signal: the warmest years cluster in recent decades, and the coldest ones are nowhere near the present. Air frost tells the same story from the other end — fewer freezing days per winter than the village once knew.

Rainfall deserves more honesty than headlines usually give it. Year to year, it swings wildly — one of the wettest and one of the driest years sit close together in the record. Smooth those swings into decades, and a slow rise emerges. The trend is real, but modest. It doesn’t mean every summer is a washout or every winter a flood. It means the odds have shifted.

Sunshine is the quietest voice in the room: a noisy record with a bright spell in the 1940s and 1950s, and a 2020s figure that sits higher — though on only five years of data. Alone it would be a hint. Beside the temperature and frost records, it adds weight.

Honest by design

Some signals here are clearer than others. Where the evidence is noisy, we say so rather than sharpen the pencil until the picture flatters the story. Even the cautious reading shows change — and it’s local. Click through any tile for the full breakdown, the methodology, and what each dataset can and cannot claim.

Click on charts to learn more.

Temperature: the clearest signal

Overnight lowsDaytime highsLows 5.2 → 7.4°C (+ 2.2°C)Highs 14.1 → 16.0°C (+ 1.9°C)* part-decade (6 yrs of data)Data: HadUK-Grid v1.3.2 (Met Office / CEDA)

Air frost: fewer freezing days

Average days of air frost per month — by decade (days)Dashed line: long-term mean (3.32 days)Most frost: 1950s · Least frost: 2020s1930s vs 2020s: 3.50 → 2.43 (−1.07 days/month)* part-decade (partial data)Data: HadUK-Grid v1.3.2 (Met Office / CEDA)

Annual rainfall: year-to-year swings

Rainfall by decade: the longer view

Sunshine: a supporting witness

The chart here shows the same measure — decadal mean temperature — for the United Kingdom, drawn from the Met Office’s HadUK-Grid dataset. Over the full record, from the 1880s to today, UK daily maxima have risen from 11.3°C to 13.5°C, and minima from 4.1°C to 6.1°C. That is a warming of roughly two degrees. Monkton Heathfield’s own series, shown above, has warmed by almost exactly the same amount.

Look closer and the comparison becomes more interesting still. The village runs warmer than the national average — about 2.5°C warmer on daily maxima and around 1.3°C warmer on minima, which is simply what you’d expect from southern England set against a UK figure that includes the Scottish Highlands. But here is the point worth pausing on: that gap has barely moved in 140 years. Monkton Heathfield has tracked the national record steadily, through the cool 1960s, the stepping-up of the 1990s, and the record warmth of the 2020s. When the country warmed, we warmed with it.

Both records agree on the shape of the story. The warmest decade in each is the 2020s. The 1960s dip appears in both. The same weather, seen at two scales.