Global Discussion : From Wet To DryAdded : Tuesday at 18:25 It's been a rather impressive few months across the UK in terms of the extremes which can be delivered. An exceptionally wet winter and early Spring which some regions recording rainfall of some sort on most, if not all days.
The late Spring though has delivered the complete opposite. Endless sunshine and dry weather with high pressure being well in control of the weather.
If you look at the climatic deviation for today then you can see an inkling as to what's been happening :-
You can see the cooler weather further East and warmer weather further West. At the moment, and for the last few weeks, the jet stream has been what we call meridional, where it deviates from North to South in dramatic fashion.
Subsequently, over the winter, the jet stream remained extremely zonal with low pressure areas and more importantly atmospheric rivers running in from the Southwest.
So what caused this? It's impossible to tell sadly, but one thing meteorologists have been aware of over this winter was the incredibly strong and resolute polar vortex. The vortex handled almost everything which was thrown at it in terms of warming cycles. This produced the unsettled weather and something which wasn't wholly unexpected.
To have such a dry and warm Spring with high pressure so prevalent could have been part and parcel of the vortex breaking down and releasing the cooler air in the Arctic to lower levels. This increasingly contrasting airmasses between old Arctic and tropical air could have created a strong enough gradient to cause this meridional and blocking pattern across Western Europe.
One thing is for sure, next week it's back to sunshine and showers. The weather seems to know how to balance everything out eventually, but balancing a wet few months with a dry and sunny few months was something new for us too.
METEOROLOGIST : MARSH |