State of the UK climate 2020

This report provides a summary of the UK weather and climate through the calendar year 2020, alongside the historical context for a number of essential climate variables. This is the seventh in a series of annual ‘State of the UK climate’ publications and an update to the 2019 report (Kendon et al., 2020). It provides an accessible, authoritative and up-to-date assessment of UK climate trends, variations and extremes based on the most up to date observational datasets of climate quality. The majority of this report is based on observations of temperature, precipitation, sunshine and wind speed from the UK land weather station network as managed by the Met Office and a number of key partners and co-operating volunteers. The observations are carefully managed such that they conform to current best practice observational standards as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The observations also pass through a range of quality assurance procedures at the Met Office before application for climate monitoring. Time series of near-coast sea-surface temperature and sea-level are also presented and in addition a short section on phenology which provides dates of first leaf and bare tree indicators for four common shrub or tree species.