No wonder you couldn't sleep: Some places in NI never got below 19C last night

The coolest it got for some residents of Northern Ireland overnight last night was 19.1C, Met Office figures have shown.

That reading, known as the highest daily minimum, was recorded at Murlough in Co Down at 7.37am today, making it the Province’s warmest place overnight.

placeholder image — A shirtless cyclist at Hampstead Heath, London, with the city's skyline in the background beneath clear blue skies today (Ben Whitley/PA Wire)

That figure is not far off the warmest overnight temperature ever recorded in Northern Ireland: 19.6C on August 14, 2001, in Whitehouse, Belfast.

The next warmest place to be on Thursday/Friday night was Stormont in Belfast, when the coolest it got was 18.1C, at 6.29am.

And the very lowest that the temperature got overnight, anywhere in Northern Ireland, was Ballypatrick Forest in north Antrim, where it fell to 12.9C at 5am.

GB’s hottest daily minimum temperature overnight was Herstmonceux, East Sussex, where the temperature never fell below 22.7C (recorded at 4.51am).

In Scotland, it was 19.2C at Threave (4.06am) and in Wales it was 22C at Swyddffynnon (4.41am).

The all-time UK record for highest daily minimum temperature is 26.8C, recorded on July 19, 2022, at Shirburn Model Farm in Oxfordshire.

As for daytime highs today, Northern Ireland saw its fifth consecutive day of heatwave temperatures (a heatwave being three or more days when it gets above 25C).

Aldergrove hit 25.8C at 3.46pm – hot, but not record-breaking for the month – followed by 25.6C at Katesbridge in Co Down at 1.58pm, and 25C at Hillsborough at 3.03pm.

For the UK as a whole though, a new June record was set when temperatures reached 37.3C at Stanton Downham in West Sussex today – smashing a record of 36.7C which had been set just one day earlier at Merryfield in Somerset.

Prior to this week, the hottest June temperatures ever recorded were in the sweltering summer of 1976, when a high of 35.6C had been reached on June 28.

As for what comes next for Northern Ireland, tomorrow is set to be bright with some clouds and scattered showers, said the Met Office, with highs of 22C, while it will stay warm on Sunday and Monday “but with a freshening breeze” and scattered showers.