Fridays Fun and GamesAdded : Friday at 12:58 It's not often that the UK sees such a huge variation on the weather within the 600 or so miles from Cornwall to Scotland, but today certainly was one of those days. If you take a look at the precipitype at the moment :-
You can see the frontal system which has been crossing the UK over the last 24 or so hours running into colder air across Scotland and Northern England which brought a fair amount of the white stuff for Northern areas, sleet further South and then rain to the South of that.
Something which did catch our eye this morning though was some fairly active thunderstorms along the English Channel. These were falling as hail and rain and simply added to the hugely complex mix of weather many of us were seeing.
If you take a look at the Arpege model which shows this mornings synoptic chart :-
You can see a low pressure system to the Northwest of Scotland and then an elongated trough extending from this right down to the Southeast of England.
Meteorologists call this a sharp, negatively tilted trough. It basically is where the air rushes in from the West along the isobars and then at the base of the trough it is forced to turn to the North and this induces some spin as well as uplift within the front.
Add in the moist and milder air coming in from the West ahead of colder air to the East and this is what provided the energy for the thunderstorms this morning.
To be honest, we missed it, sorry about that. It's one of those things which we always watch for during the Summer months, but during winter months they tend to be far less of an issue. But, if you live on the South coast and wondered why you saw thunderstorms which weren't forecast and were as impressive as the Summer ones then now you know why and what to look out for in synoptic charts in the future (just in case we miss it again).
METEOROLOGIST : MISSEDIT |