By the end of June, England and Wales had received more rainfall than in any comparable period since 1992. July has continued in the same vein. The Met Office confirmed this week that the first half of 2026 is the wettest on record for several regions, including the South West, the Midlands and parts of Yorkshire.
The immediate effects are visible: flooded fields, disrupted harvests, rivers running at winter levels in midsummer. The National Farmers' Union has warned that the wet conditions, following a cold spring, will significantly reduce yields of winter wheat and oilseed rape. Some farmers in the worst-affected areas are reporting their worst harvest in two decades.
The relationship between the wet summer and climate change is real but not straightforward. Climate change does not simply mean warmer and drier conditions everywhere. In Britain, the primary effect of rising global temperatures on precipitation patterns is to intensify the water cycle: warmer air holds more moisture, which means that when it rains, it tends to rain harder. The jet stream, which governs the track of weather systems across the North Atlantic, has also been behaving unusually, remaining further south than normal and directing a succession of Atlantic weather systems directly at the British Isles.
Scientists are careful to distinguish between attribution — the question of whether a specific event was made more likely by climate change — and prediction. The wet summer of 2026 is consistent with climate projections for Britain, but consistency is not causation. What the data shows clearly is that the frequency of extreme precipitation events in Britain has increased over the past fifty years, and that this trend is expected to continue.