LONDON: The UK on Friday experienced its warmest New Year’s Eve on record with temperatures hovering around 15 degrees Celsius, the Met Office said.

       The village of Ryehill in Yorkshire in northern England recorded a temperature of 14.9C at 11am on Friday, breaking a previous record of 14.8C set in Wales in 2011, Met Office spokesperson Stephen Dixon said.

       The Met Office later tweeted that the village of Coningsby in Lincolnshire in the East Midlands had recorded 15.3C “meaning today is the warmest New Year’s Eve on record for the UK”.

       Temperatures of 15C were forecast for several cities including London and Cardiff on Friday. “We are ending 2021 on a very mild note across the UK,” the Met Office said.

       Despite the warm conditions, the UK celebrates New Year’s Eve in muted fashion without the usual grandiose fireworks displays in London and Edinburgh, and with nightclubs closed and limits on social gatherings in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

       This year “as a whole has been slightly warmer and slightly drier than average,” Mike Kendon of the National Climate Information Centre, said in a summary published by the Met Office.

       The outgoing year is “likely to fall inside the top 20 warmest years on record for the UK -- a series which begins in 1884,” the Met Office said, as “our climate is warming”.

       Published in Dawn, January 1st, 2022