Wet winter, hot summer? What ‘climate whiplash’ means for the UK

By Chloe Brimicombe, Postdoctoral Researcher, Climate Science, University of Oxford

After a dry 2025 with the UK’s warmest summer on record, winter 2026 delivered something very different: rain for 50 days in a row in parts of Devon and Cornwall, one of the rainiest seasons on record and only 80% of average sunshine.

Scientists have given this a name: climate whiplash.

Climate whiplash describes rapid swings from one type of weather extreme to another, most commonly from really persistent drought to really persistent wet weather. Globally, such swings have increased in recent…

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