Past three years were Gib’s warmest on record, Met Office confirms
SLOW START: It was a frustrating start to 2025 for some passengers flying from Gibraltar to London Heathrow on New Year’s Day after their flight was cancelled due to a technical issue with the plane. The aircraft, pictured above on Thursday morning, eventually left Gibraltar later that afternoon, approximately 23 hours after its scheduled departure.
The Gibraltar Met Office has confirmed that 2022, 2023 and 2024 were the three warmest years on record in Gibraltar.
The Gibraltar Met Office released their figures for 2024 on Thursday, with last year becoming Gibraltar’s second warmest year on record.
This was just 0.1° Celsius under 2023’s record.
The daily mean temperature in 2024 was 19.7° Celsius, the Met Office said, which means the warmest year on record remains 2023 with a daily mean temperature of 19.8° Celsius.
This comes after two record breaking years as at the time 2022 broke the record with a mean temperature of 19.5°C.
The previous record set was in 1997 with 19.3°C.
This has meant that the past three years have been the warmest on record, in order of 2023, 2024, and 2022 as the figures show rising temperatures
Last year broke another record, this time for the mildest nights, with a mean night-time minimum temperature of 16.9° Celsius, which is 1.2° Celsius higher than the 30-year long term average (1991-2020) of 15.7° Celsius.
The record breaking for 2024 did not end there.
The year witnessed the warmest January, February and November on record in Gibraltar.
January had a daily mean temperature of 15.4° Celsius, followed by February with 16.0° Celsius, and November with 18.7° Celsius.
September 2024 also broke record for the highest night-time minimum temperature of 25.2° Celsius (the night of the 31st of August into the 1st of September 2024).
The warming temperatures locally have followed a global trend.
In the UK, 2024 was the country’s fourth warmest on record.
Provisional figures for 2024 from the UK Met Office showed an average temperature for the UK of 9.78C, 0.64C above the 1991-2020 average and putting it in fourth place for the warmest year following 2022, 2023 and 2014.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) confirmed that worldwide, 2024 was set to be the hottest year ever recorded, breaking the previous record which was set just a year before in 2023.
The UN’s secretary-general Antonio Guterres said the world had endured a “decade of deadly heat”, with 2024 capping 10 years of unprecedented temperatures in what he described as “climate breakdown, in real time”.
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