Updated: 2026-07-30
78 frost days — that's the highest number recorded in any single year at the Met Office's Coton-in-the-Elms station. It happened twice: in 1996 and again in 2010. In 1996, the minimum temperature dropped below 0 °C on 78 separate days, while in 2010 the same mark was reached. No other year in the 1991–2025 series comes close; the next highest is 66 frost days (2001 and 2013).
At the other extreme, 2014 saw just 23 frost days, and 2024 — the last complete year — logged 26. That puts 2024 among the six mildest winters on record for this village in Staffordshire.
Coton-in-the-Elms, often cited as the most inland settlement in Britain, sits on a flat, open plain where cold air pools readily on clear nights. The result is a surprisingly high number of frost days for a location at just 52°N and a short distance from the Irish Sea. Officially, the Met Office station at Coton-in-the-Elms (ID 00542) has been recording daily minimum temperatures since 1991, and the data tell a clear story: frost is a regular feature of winter here, but the count varies enormously from year to year.
Over the full period 1991–2025, the annual number of frost days ranges from 23 (2014) to 78 (1996 and 2010). That's a spread of 55 frost days between the mildest and harshest years. To put it in perspective: in 2014, frost occurred on roughly one in every sixteen days; in 1996, it occurred on more than one in every five.
The table below lists the number of days each calendar year when the minimum temperature fell below 0 °C. Notice the clustering of high values in the early 1990s (1993: 51, 1995: 59, 1996: 78) and again in the early 2010s (2010: 78, 2011: 27, 2013: 66). Since 2014, the only year to exceed 50 frost days was 2021, with 56.
The chart shows the complete annual series. The table lists the most notable years; the full series comes from Met Office.
| Year | Frost days (tmin < 0 °C) |
|---|---|
| 1995 | 59 |
| 1996 | 78 |
| 2001 | 66 |
| 2003 | 63 |
| 2010 | 78 |
| 2013 | 66 |
| 2014 | 23 |
The annual frost count at Coton-in-the-Elms is heavily influenced by the position of the jet stream and the frequency of blocking highs in winter. Years like 1996 and 2010, which share the joint record of 78 frost days, were characterised by persistent cold easterly or northerly flows that kept the village under a freezing airmass for weeks on end. In contrast, 2014 (23 frost days) was dominated by mild, wet south-westerlies, with only occasional short-lived frosts.
The annual mean minimum temperature (tmin) tracks this behaviour closely. The coldest year in the series, measured by average overnight low, was 2010 with a mean tmin of 4.9 °C — the same year that logged 78 frost days. The warmest was 2024, with a mean tmin of 7.0 °C and only 26 frost days. That 2.1 °C gap in average overnight temperature translates into a dramatic difference in how often the thermometer touches freezing.
Looking at the extremes of the whole 35-year series, the five years with the fewest frost days are all clustered in the last decade or so: 2014 (23 frost days), 1991 (24), 2002 (26), 2024 (26), and 2011 (27). The five harshest are 1996 (78), 2010 (78), 2001 (66), 2013 (66), and 2003 (63). The 1990s and early 2010s were clearly frostier periods, while the mid-2010s onward have generally been milder — though 2021 (56 frost days) shows that a cold winter can still interrupt the trend.
All figures come from the Met Office's MIDAS archive, the UK's official daily weather database. For Coton-in-the-Elms station (ID 00542), we count every calendar day where the 09:00-to-09:00 minimum temperature (tmin) falls below 0 °C. The count runs from 1 January to 31 December each year. The data span from 1991 to the most recent complete year (2024), plus a partial record for 2025 (40 frost days recorded up to end of available data).
This is the same dataset used by the Met Office itself for its official UK climate statistics — no averaging, no interpolation, just the raw station log.
Source: Met Office MIDAS (Integrated Data Archive System) — Coton-in-the-Elms station (ID 00542), 1991–2025. Open Government Licence v3.0. Data retrieved from the CEDA archive.
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© 2026 HistoClima · data: Met Office (OGL v3.0) · not affiliated with Met Office · citation permitted with source.