Apologies for the late arrival of this article. I wrote the code to identify the earliest and latest date a temperature in Central England achieved a given threshold way back in March, but I must have got fed up with it happening in 2024, so forgot all about it! In this case it was a maximum of 20°C that I was interested in, and it finally managed it this year on the 10th of May, which by coincidence is the average date it’s done this since 1878. Having said that, because this date is getting earlier, if you use a linear trend the first 20°C should happen by the 28th of April these days, so it’s really 12 days late this year. Not a lot of people know that. 😉