England's Temperature in 2014

2014 was UK's hottest year on record, says Met Office. What does that mean on a day to day basis? England has a collected data on daily temperature from 1772 in the Hadley Centre Central England Temperature (HadCET) dataset.

According to wikipedia, last year was the hottest year in this dataset with an average temperature of 10.94 °C.

I downloaded this Hadley Centre dataset. And I followed this tutorial. Based on an original graphic by Tufte. The picture is similar to the one from my post on Dublin's 2014 Weather.

Looking at the black line that represents last years temperatures it was the winter and autumn that were far above average. Instead of a scorching hot summer the three record hot days were in October and December. No day in 2014 was the coldest for that date in the recorded time.

The wikipedia page on this dataset shows the average temperature of this dataset rising over time