Updated: 2026-07-31
On 18–19 July 2022, Waddington experienced its most extreme heatwave on record: 2 consecutive days with maximum temperatures reaching or exceeding 35°C. That two-day burst of intense heat stands as the longest such streak in the station's entire history, from 1 January 1949 through 31 December 2025 — a record that has not been matched in the years since.
For a village in Lincolnshire, where summer days often hover in the low 20s, hitting 35°C once is remarkable. Doing it twice in a row — as happened on 18 and 19 July 2022 — is the kind of event that leaves a mark on the local climate record. The Met Office's official MIDAS dataset, which consolidates daily observations from Waddington's weather station (indicator 00384), confirms that no other heatwave in the station's 77-year observation period has matched this 2-day run.
The data tells a clear story: Waddington's climate has warmed, and extreme heat events like this one are becoming more part of the picture. But even with recent warming, the 2022 heatwave stands alone at the top. It wasn't just hot — it was persistently hot, day after day, pushing the limits of what the station has recorded since observations began in 1949.
Here is the single longest heatwave Waddington has ever seen, with its exact dates and duration:
| Start Date | End Date | Days |
|---|---|---|
| 2022-07-18 | 2022-07-19 | 2 |
To give context to the record, here are the five longest heatwaves (consecutive days with maximum temperature ≥ 35°C) ever recorded at Waddington. The 2022 event leads the pack, and only one other heatwave has even reached the 35°C threshold for a full day:
| Start Date | End Date | Days |
|---|---|---|
| 2022-07-18 | 2022-07-19 | 2 |
| 2019-07-25 | 2019-07-25 | 1 |
The list is short — and that's exactly the point. In the entire period from 1949 to 2025, Waddington has only seen two events where the maximum temperature hit 35°C or above: the 2-day heatwave of July 2022 and a single day in July 2019. The 2019 event, which occurred on 25 July 2019, lasted just 1 day. For a station with a long, continuous observation record, this rarity underscores how exceptional the 2022 heatwave was — not just in duration, but in simply reaching that threshold at all.
Waddington's climate is typically temperate, with cool summers compared to much of southern Europe. The fact that the record heatwave is only 2 days long tells you how infrequently the station reaches such extreme temperatures. Yet the recent dates of both events — 2022 and 2019 — are worth noting. Both occurred within the last decade of the observation period, aligning with broader trends of warming summers in the UK. The Met Office's own analyses of long-term climate data have highlighted an increase in the frequency of high-temperature days across the country, and Waddington's records fit that pattern.
For residents and visitors, these extremes matter. A heatwave like the one in July 2022 isn't just a statistic — it affects health, infrastructure, agriculture, and daily life. Knowing that Waddington's record stands at 2 consecutive days above 35°C, set in 2022, provides a baseline for understanding how unusual such events are here, and how the local climate may be shifting.
The record remains intact as of the most recent data on 31 December 2025. Whether it will stand for decades, as it has since 2022, or be surpassed soon, only the coming summers will tell. But for now, 18–19 July 2022 holds the title: Waddington's longest heatwave on record.
These figures come from the Met Office MIDAS (Integrated Data Archive System), the UK's official national weather observation archive. The analysis covers daily records from Waddington's weather station (indicator 00384) spanning 1 January 1949 to 31 December 2025. The heatwave is defined as consecutive days where the daily maximum temperature reached or exceeded 35°C, grouped by the gaps-and-islands method to identify continuous runs. The dataset is maintained by the Met Office, the UK's national meteorological service, and is publicly available under the Open Government Licence (OGL v3.0) via the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA).
Source: Met Office MIDAS — Waddington station, 1949–2025
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