summer's weather extremes. they'll show me a0 degrees in the uk is virtually impossible without climate change and why hotter heatwaves matter. we have 40 degrees. many more people die than if we just have 36 degrees. and that is — that is a huge difference. also on weather world — devastating drought for east africa, facing an unprecedented fifth consecutive failed rainy season. and how the same weather pattern could bring yet more flooding rain to eastern australia. this is weather world. this is wennington, a small village which, despite being in east london,

is surrounded by a lot of grassland and farmland. it was a place that few people outside the local area would've heard of until disaster hit, when a devastating wildfire swept through the village at the end of the day when the uk hit a0 degrees celsius for the very first time. tonight at 10:00, the uk has today recorded its highest ever temperature — 40.3 degrees celsius in lincolnshire. july the 19th — the day the uk reached a temperature that once seemed impossible and with extreme heat, fire. in wennington, a small blaze soon became an inferno that destroyed 19 homes. i needed to leave and so, i left and went to my local church, �*cos we've got a community church. but after spending a few minutes in the church, then we realised that the church ground was also on fire, so we were told to evacuate the church. i was sunbathing in my garden

and then, a massive black cloud's come across. i looked up, that side of wennington was on fire and within an hour, it spread all the way to my house. it wasn'tjust the london fire brigade that was stretched to the limit as fires broke out in many areas, including a huge blaze in yorkshire. it was a heatwave on a scale never seen before across western europe. here in spain, the most intense on record. multiple fires broke out here as well. passengers look out of this train to flames that can be seen on both sides. summer heat reached new heights in asia, too. for the first time ever, japan hit a0 degrees in the month ofjune and tokyo had its highestjune temperature in records going back to 1865. in china, record june temperatures led to thousands trying to cool down in a giant open—air swimming pool in zhengzhou.

by august, china was suffering its longest heatwave on record with drought across a huge central swathe of the country. and it was drought combined with heat that helped the uk fires, like this one in wennington, spread so quickly. the met office says southern england had its driest the met office says southern england had its driest july in records that began in 1836. i've come to the fire station in wennington to speak to its commander, graham beers. graham, you've been in the fire service for almost 20 years. have you ever had a day quite like the 19th ofjuly? no, 19th ofjuly was just something out of the ordinary. i've been to many grass fires within my 19—year career but the 19th ofjuly, it wasjust something, you know, that i've never experienced before in my career. so, here in wennington, talk me through what happened. i was in another severe incident near rainham but i was getting reports that a fire had broken out in wennington and it had actually started affecting the properties. i then attended, went in to see

the devastation and one of the things that, actually, i was very shocked about is, as you can see from here, how close we was to losing the fire station. it's come within about two foot of the diesel tank, the station itself. so, we're actually standing next to 5,000 litres of diesel just here and you can see where the flames got really, really close, licking up the side of the diesel storage, so it could have been an awful lot worse. yeah, it's due to the hard work of the crews that attended the fire on that day. yeah, the crews must have been seriously stretched on that day because, of course, this wasn't an isolated incident, and you had other really major fires in the local area and right across london, so just how did you cope as a fire service? so, that's right, it's actually been stated as the worst day for london fire brigade since world war two, our busiest time. if you look at the stats from last year, the first two weeks of august, we attended between a0 and 50 grass fires. to this year, where we attended, the first two weeks in august, we attended between 150 and 200 grass fires. so, it's a really big jump

from one year to the next. and you've been working a lot with members of the public here in the community as well, trying to push the fire safety message since the fire injuly, so what sort of advice are you giving people? fire safety advice, notjust in the home but in their gardens as well. safe disposal of cigarettes, safe use of barbecues. just be sensible with it. have a purpose—built barbecue and have a bucket of water next to it, just in case that barbecue does start getting out of control. great advice. thank you so much, graham. we'll have more from here later in the programme, when we'll be discussing how heat and drought are fuelling ever—more intense wildfires across the globe. showing the link between extreme weather and climate change used to take months, even years, but now, scientists here at imperial college london have developed new methods that can cut that time to just days. imperial college london is home to the grantham institute, which is the central hub of world weather attribution,

a network of scientists around the world, whose aim is to deliver rapid analysis of extreme weather and how much more likely it is because of climate change. well, with me now is dr fredi 0tto, who leads the world weather attribution group. i want to ask first of all, the most important question is what did you learn about the link between that uk heatwave and climate change? i think the main results from that study were that this heatwave would have been four degrees cooler, if it would've happened at the beginning of the industrial revolution — or in other words, that a heatwave like this has been made at least ten times more likely because of human—induced climate change. so, basically, we would not have seen a heatwave like this if it wasn't for climate change. how are you able to do an analysis and come up with the results so quickly? because i can remember the time when it would take months, even sometimes years, to find the link between climate change and extreme weather and yet this, your study, came out

a week after the uk heatwave. so, how so quick? all our methods are peer—reviewed, so we are not actually doing something new scientifically, we just apply methods that have been tested many times to a new event. and the other thing — and that's probably even the more important one — is that we have a team of people around the world who think this is really important, who also feel it's really important that you have scientific evidence in the immediate aftermath of such an event to occur and so, drop everything else and do this study. so, there's an urgency there, isn't it? urgency of people's connection between the two things? yes, i think we can — we can not only sort of show in a paper that climate change is happening, but we can connect that to our experience and our feelings. this is what climate change means. dr 0tto, thank you for now.

we will come back to you later in the programme for some final thoughts. and also coming up, i'll be looking in even more detail about how that study of the uk heatwave and its link to climate change was done. world weather attribution scientists also studied this year's searing pre—monsoon heatwave in india and pakistan, which affected millions of people. their verdict — it was made 30 times more likely because of climate change. in pakistan in may, flooding from a rapidly—melting glacier caused this bridge to collapse. panicked shouting temperatures were from five to eight degrees above average across large swathes of the country. now to africa, where in the east, the worst drought in decades is placing millions of people at risk of severe hunger. the rains they rely on to grow crops and feed animals have failed four times in a row.

from bbc weather�*s climate check studio, ben rich looks at why the wait for rain is likely to go on. this part of africa relies on two rainy seasons each year, driven by the intertropical convergence zone, or the itcz, a band of thunderstorms that encircles the planet near the equator. the strong heat of the sun causes air to rise, helped by converging trade winds from northern and southern hemispheres, generating a zone of intense downpours. as the sun shifts northwards and southwards, relative to the earth, so does the itcz. as it moves northwards, it brings the so—called long rains from march to may. this year, those long rains failed. as it moves back southwards, there's a briefer wet season, known as the short rains, from october to december, and long—range forecasts suggest this could fail, too. 0ranges and browns on this map show predicted rainfall below normal.

this would mean an unprecedented fifth consecutive failed rainy season. one reason is a long—lasting la nina in the pacific, which can bring weather impacts across the globe, including dryness in east africa. for people in eastern africa, in the regions where we have two rainfall season in a year, we need to have two consecutive rain seasons that have failed for people to start experiencing the severe impacts of this rain shortage and unfortunately for this specific case, this is the fifth consecutive season. what it means is that people actually have no longer at all anything to rely upon, apart from humanitarian help, in that drought—affected region so, as a result, there will be a need for humanitarian organisations to increase the help. and this is also, i think, an opportunity to call for more resources to kind of shift more

attention towards this region, which is becoming more and more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. some of your weather watcher pictures now, and more views of the uk's record—breaking july heatwave. as well as hitting a0 degrees for the first time, new national records were set in scotland and wales. northern ireland was just 0.1 degrees short of its all—time record, which was set injuly last year. and in the channel islands, with 37.9 degrees, jersey had its hottest day in records going back to 189a. still to come on weather world, here we go again — will australia see yet more of this, as a third consecutive la nina looks increasingly likely? this time on weather world, i'm in wennington in east london, which, on the uk's hottest day injuly, suffered a devastating wildfire that damaged or destroyed many of the homes here.

and it's notjust people here counting the cost. record heat and drought have fuelled wildfires across much of western europe. spain injuly, and angel martin arjona in his bulldozer is trying to dig a trench to stop fire spreading to his nearby town. he's slowly swallowed up by the flames. it's the narrowest escape imaginable. he survived, but with severe burns. conditions forfire are made worse by drought. and in august, two thirds of europe was under some sort of drought warning, with claims this could be the worst such event in 500 years. fires burned in the usa too. global forest watch says the amount of tree cover being burned around the world has nearly doubled in the last 20 years. i'm joined now by dr matt jones, a climate scientist from the university of east anglia. and matt, your research focuses on climate change and how that impacts the rate and intensity of wildfires.

so how much has our warming world had an impact on wildfires? so, just to put things into perspective, our world is now about 1.2 degrees warmer than it was in 1750. on average, and that's as a result of the emissions of greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution. so, one degree might not sound like a huge amount at first glance, but actually that's been more than enough to shift the frequency of many episodes of extreme weather, and that includes both droughts and heatwaves. these conditions have really special significance for wildfires, of course, because it's in these conditions that living vegetation can dry out. so can the dead leaves and twigs and other litter on the forest floor. and all you really need in this situation is for an ignition source, such as from humans, or from lightning, to start a fire, and a fire can quickly grow out of control. fire has always been a part

of life in these parts of the world, but with the increasing frequency of really significant wildfires, what's the knock—on implications and consequences for the environment? essentially, what happens when you have an increase in the amount of area burned by fires is that you place a greater proportion of a forest landscape into a degraded state that stores less carbon. and so what we're seeing as wildfire burns a greater area of forest each year is a suppression of the amount of carbon that forests hold. and what that means is that there's more carbon being emitted into the atmosphere. so, the catch—all measure for identifying the risk of wildfires is something called the fire weather index. now what is that and why is it such an important measure? a high fire weather index will indicate to you that there's, that the temperature's high, there's not been much rainfall recently, that humidity is quite low and also that there may be some dangerous winds. and all of these things kind of conspire to elevate the risk of a wildfire growing and also becoming difficult to control. so, exactly like we saw here in wennington and right across many parts of the uk back injuly,

then, there must have been a very high fire weather index? absolutely. yeah. so, on the day of the fires, there was a record fire weather index in the uk. and actually, this level of fire weather is something that would, it would trigger an outright ban in some countries of the world, for example, in australia, on the use of fire outdoors. and it's something we're going to have to learn to deal with here in the uk and take examples from abroad, as to how you deal with the conditions that we're going to face more frequently. 0k, thank you so much, matt. thank you very much. we've already heard how record july temperatures in the uk would have been virtually impossible without climate change. now i'm going to meet one of the scientists from world weather attribution to find out more about their research. dr mariam zachariah, you worked on the study linking the uk heat wave to climate change. i'm really interested to know how you did that. we're going to be helped by this plot here, which refers to the st james�*s park weather station in central london. and basically on this, up here,

you've got the temperature and then along the bottom you've got years. so it's basically the chance of something happening every certain number of years from, well, down here, it would be happening every year to something here, happening every, say, 10,000 years. now, we've got some lines on here that we're interested in looking at. so tell me more about what this shows and essentially the result of your study. the stars that you see on the plots are the maximum temperatures observed every year at the station, at this particular weather station. so, the red line here represents the distribution for the world we live in, which is the current climate. and then what we did is we essentially shifted this distribution to represent a world without climate change, and that would be about 1.2 degrees celsius cooler. and that is what is shown by this blue line. now, the magenta line was the temperature that we saw this year at the weather station, and that was about 38.8 degrees celsius. what we should be looking at is the point where the magenta line intersects with either of these lines.

for the red line, which is the current world, we see that this point intersects somewhere there and that comes to about 600 years. now, what that means is the chances of the temperatures that we saw this year happening in the observations was about once in 600 years. but what is interesting here is that the blue line, essentially this blue line, it never coincides essentially, this blue line, it never coincides with the magenta line. now, what that means is such an event would have been statistically impossible in a world without climate change. it's fascinating to see that, as you said, in the pre—industrial world, which is the blue line, it doesn't even get anywhere near that temperature! and in fact, the highest that i can see here is about 32.5 degrees. follow that down. that's basically saying in the pre—industrial world, this weather station would hit 32.5 degrees once every 10,000 years. and now that weather station probably hits it every two or three years, or something like that. that is astonishing, isn't it?

that's correct. and that's what we can expect, in terms of climate change, and that's how the temperatures are behaving to climate change. but it's sort of not limited to temperatures alone. but we sort of see this these kind of changes for every other extreme event. so to what extent and to what degree, that is what we try to answer through attribution studies. it's notjust heatwaves that these scientists study. brazil in may and devastating floods and landslides in the north—east, where 70% of the month's average rainfall fell in less than 2a hours. rain that world weather attribution says would have been less intense in the pre—industrial climate. floods have wreaked havoc far and wide in the usa. injune, its oldest national park, yellowstone, saw widespread damage from historic rainfall, mixed with rapid snow melt.

after the heat, intense monsoon rain causes flooding across parts of india, pakistan and bangladesh, killing hundreds of people. in china injune, rescuers struggle to reach communities cut off by the highest rainfall since the 1960s. hundreds of thousands of people have to leave their homes. and in south korea in august, the heaviest rain in 80 years hit areas around the capital, seoul, flooding the metro below ground and swamping the streets above. flood rescues in australia, as the ongoing global la nina weather pattern brings yet more extreme rain. sydney had its wettestjuly in over 160 years of records and there could be more to come, with a rare third la nina year now looking likely, and there could be further worrying signs for the future. scientists from the university of new south wales say atlantic ocean circulations, which in part take warmer waters from the tropics

northwards, are showing signs of weakening, due to climate change. and this could mean more frequent la nina conditions and therefore flooding in eastern australia. what we see is that the heat is not transported any more i i from the tropics to the tropicsl and then it causes the northern hemisphere to cool and i the southern hemisphere to keep the heat. so there is a contrast - between the temperatures in the northern hemisphere i and the southern hemisphere. and this difference _ in temperature causes a massive disruption in the atmospheric dynamics and changes - the atmospheric circulation . in a way that puts the tropical pacific into a la nina state. so it's quite interesting, because what happens l in the atlantic, it can impact|

the tropical pacific and it can have implications for the whole globe, including australia. - back here at imperial college london, i am with dr fredi 0tto again, she leads the world weather attribution group here, to get some final thoughts from you. what stands out for you from what we have seen, extreme weather wise, in the summer of the northern hemisphere this year? so what stood out for me this year were the wildfires. we have seen many, many heatwaves simultaneously in past years, 2018 for example, also 2019. but this year that has been combined with a drought, and in many cases, that led to wildfires on a scale that i have not really seen in europe. i know as a weather presenter, meteorologist, that covering these stories, i get comments sent to me, people saying, "it is just summer, it gets hot in summer, you are taking the fun out of summer". do you get comments like that,

did they get you down? yes i do get comments like that, and people sent me lists of past heatwaves as if that would prove that climate change doesn't exist — because no—one says that we never had heatwaves without climate change. in the uk it is always, "oh, but it was hot in 1976," which is true, of course there are heatwaves without climate change. but with climate change we see many more heatwaves, and they are hotter than they would be. and if you are lucky and healthy and rich and have a well—insulated house, that might still be fun. but if you are not rich and live in good housing, and if you maybe have already health conditions to deal with, then this can, this "we take the fun out" is actually a question of life and death. i've come to wennington parish church of st mary and st peter, now, right in the centre of the village. and the vicar here is reverend elise peterson. now, she's currently over

in the united states, but she's agreed to talk to us via video link. so, reverend elise, thanks so much for talking to us today. now, i'm standing here in the churchyard. the ground is really, really scorched. the bushes are burnt as well, but actually, the church itself looks relatively unscathed. yeah, we can see that the fire burned all around the churchyard, but actually did not touch the church walls. we've got some smoke damage and things inside, but it's really quite miraculous. and even the villagers themselves have described it as a halo around the church. if you look at an aerial view, there's a strip of grass almost the entire way around where the fire did not get to the church walls itself. and since that wildfire you have been very much involved in rebuilding the community here and supporting the community, how have the residents been rallying around? the first sunday after the fire i hadn't intended on having a service because the building was still close, but

had tea and coffee and cake and just let them connect with one another. and you're from the west coast of the united states, so you must be quite used to seeing wildfires like this on a bigger scale out there. but how shocking was it for you to see something like this happen here in this small village in east london? yeah, it was like nothing i would have ever expected. i did, i spent a lot of my growing—up years in california, where wildfires were just part of the summer, just something you expected, although definitely we've seen them become more intense in recent years, even in california. but, yeah, would have never expected something like this to happen in east london. thank you so much for taking time out to talk to us, reverend elise. you're very welcome. and that's it for this edition of weather world, at the end of an extraordinary northern hemisphere summer. we wish everyone here in wennington the very best, as they rebuild their lives. and you, too, if you've suffered through heat, drought, fire or floods. nick and i will be back later in the year with a full round—up of 2022 weather extremes.

until then, goodbye. hello there. most places drier there to start the week. of course, a bank holiday for some of you. sunniest conditions towards the south and the west right now and whilst there will be more dry weather to come through much of the working week, it is going to be still a bit breezy at times across southern areas for the next few days, turning a little warmer mid—week and there may be some rain later on. but out there today only a few showers dotted around, particularly in eastern parts of england, the north and west of

scotland and one or two other ones, but most places dry. a cool breeze over some of these eastern coasts, plenty of cloud, the sunniest and warmest conditions towards the south and the west, even into the evening, temperatures in the low 20s. through this evening and overnight, the showers in the west of scotland will fade, but a few more showers starting to crop up into parts of south—east england and east anglia and still that wind will be somewhat of a feature. it will stop the temperatures dropping much by night here, but we could get down to mid single figures across parts of scotland, parts of north—west england and north wales. but it is high pressure really dominating the weather charts at the moment. the core of that with the driest weather centred way to the north of us, so we are on the fringes and that is why we continue to see a few showers dotted around, a greater chance across eastern and south—eastern parts of england tomorrow, maybe drifting into the south east midlands, the home counties as well, a few showers in western scotland, most places dry, the cloud in scotland breaking up, sunniest conditions in the western parts of england and wales, the south—west of northern ireland as well. and again, the warmest of the weather to be found across southern counties of england and into south wales, 23—2a the high. it is warming up a bit across eastern

parts of scotland, north—east england into wednesday as the breeze eases down a bit further. there will be a few showers dotted around the pennines and the western parts of scotland as well, temperatures much like we will see on tuesday, in the mid teens across eastern areas into the mid 20s across the south. by the time we hit thursday, the wind that has been quite blustery across southern counties starts to ease a bit more, a lot more sunshine developing across the uk as well, most places dry, few, if any, showers, into the low 20s across western scotland by this stage and with lighter winds across the south the temperatures will creep up a bit more, 25 or 26. but as we head towards the end of the week and the weekend, low pressure in france, one towards the north—west, start to combine, and gives a greater chance of seeing some rain at times, especially across parts of the west of the uk. see you soon.

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street party kicks off its final day at the notting hill