Warmest night on record near Birmingham (1946–2004)

Updated: 2026-08-06

The nearest Met Office measuring point to Birmingham is the Halesowen station in the West Midlands, situated at 153 m above sea level and about 13.3 km from the city centre. It is there that the warmest night on record for the area was registered. The temperatures below refer to that observation point, not to Birmingham itself; local conditions can differ slightly due to altitude, urban heat or shelter from surrounding valleys. That said, this is the closest and most reliable reference we have.

The record remains anchored in the mid-1970s. Across the full 1946–2004 period, no other night came close to matching that August 1975 minimum. The second-warmest night in the entire series, 18.6°C on 1 July 1968, still sits 1.5°C below the peak – a considerable gap in a dataset that spans nearly six decades. The record has never been beaten since, even as other warm nights have appeared in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The five warmest nights at Halesowen

These are the top five warmest nights recorded at the station between 1946 and 2004, ordered from highest to lowest minimum temperature:

Notice how the list mixes decades: two entries from the 1960s–1980s and two from the 1990s–2000s. The 1975 night stands alone at the top, with no other night in the dataset breaking the 19°C mark.

Warmest night of each month

The table below shows, for each calendar month, the warmest minimum temperature ever recorded and the long-term average minimum temperature at Halesowen over the 1946–2004 period. The August figure of 20.1°C is the absolute peak of the whole series.

The seasonal contrast is stark: in January, the warmest night on record reached just 10.6°C, while the long-term average minimum sits at 0.9°C. Even the most exceptional winter night at Halesowen did not reach the level of a typical August night, which averages 11.1°C. The record of 20.1°C in August stands nearly 9°C above the average minimum for that month – a measure of just how extraordinary that 1975 night was.

Year by year: the warmest night of each year

This annual series shows the highest minimum temperature recorded each year at Halesowen from 1946 to 2004. The years 1946–1955 appear as gaps in the archived series, meaning the Met Office record does not include data for that period. The peak of the entire record appears in 1975 at 20.1°C, and values of 18.0°C or above appear in several later years: 1976 (18.1°C), 1983 (18.3°C), 1989 (17.8°C), 1991 (18.4°C), 1995 (18.0°C), 2000 (18.1°C), 2003 (18.1°C) and 2004 (18.4°C).

Looking at the annual series, the 1975 peak is the clear outlier. The warmest night of each year typically falls between 15°C and 18°C, with only a handful of years crossing the 18°C mark. The years 1968, 1983, 1991, 1997 and 2004 all reached 18.3°C or above, yet none matched the 20.1°C of 1975. The difference of more than a full degree between the top record and the rest of the pack suggests that the 5 August 1975 night was an exceptional event – likely a combination of a very warm air mass, clear skies and the residual heat of a hot summer day.

Interestingly, the warmest nights are not exclusively a late-20th-century phenomenon. The 1960s produced the second-highest value in the series (18.6°C in 1968), and the 1980s contributed the 18.3°C night of 1983. However, four of the ten highest annual values occurred in or after 1995, hinting at a subtle upward drift in the most extreme warm nights – though the absolute record has remained untouched for over three decades.

Source: Met Office (MIDAS data), Halesowen station, 1946–2004.

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