The edition of 3 September 2026
Oxford has just had its warmest August by day on record, in 174 Augusts of readings going back to 1853, on a figure the publisher still marks provisional and flags as estimated.
The whole record for Oxford or the Met Office file this came from.
26.5
°C
Mean daily maximum at Oxford, August 2026
The publisher marks this period provisional; it will be revised.
Everything in today's edition comes from one dataset: the Met Office added August 2026 to its historic station files this morning, and nothing else in our patch published. Twenty-two of the reporting stations recorded a top-ten warmest August by day; three of them — Oxford, Heathrow and Eastbourne — set the record outright. We name two and hold the pattern.
Both figures are provisional, and Oxford's is additionally marked estimated by the publisher. The Met Office finalises station data later; if either record moves when it does, we will say so, on this page and in the corrections log.
For the national picture, the Met Office itself has declared summer 2026 provisionally the hottest on record for the UK, from its gridded national series. Our figures are narrower and say something that series does not: one station, ranked against every August it has ever measured.
Two notes for the record. MHCLG published a temporary accommodation update today, and our software fetched it but could not read it — the file format changed in August and still awaits a human; that dataset is out of today's edition. And this letter did not go out on 2 September: the morning's run never started, so there is no 2 September edition — the archive gains that day's data through today's files instead.
Also in the data
Heathrow (London Airport) has just had its warmest August by day on record, in 79 Augusts of readings going back to 1948, on a figure the publisher still marks provisional.
The whole record for Heathrow (London Airport) or the Met Office file this came from.
How this edition was checked
| Place | Data vintage | Verification | Publisher’s file |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oxford | 2026-09-03 | Survived a blind kill attempt | the file |
| Heathrow (London Airport) | 2026-09-03 | Survived a blind kill attempt | the file |
Each claim above was put to a separate agent with only the figures and the publisher’s dataset notes — not the reasoning that chose it — which tried to kill it on the wrong column, the wrong denominator, a series break, a definition change or a revision. Nothing that failed is on this page. The archived copy of each publisher’s file is in this site’s repository under data/weather-stations/raw/2026-09-03/oxforddata.txt.
From the shelf
Three stations set their warmest August by day in the same provisional month
A story we had been watching before today. Developing threads are kept as dossiers with a written trigger — the condition, agreed in advance, that would make them worth publishing — so that what we thought before we knew stays on the record.