Last Of The Winter Whine?Added : Tuesday at 14:40 A couple of years ago, if you take your memory back, then the buzzword in the weather was "polar vortex". Every so often, we keep an eye on this feature which occurs every Winter in our hemisphere due to the possible tentative link between the state of the vortex and how it may affect pressure patterns across the Northern hemisphere.
The problem with the vortex is that sometimes the shifts in pattern propagate downwards and affect the weather patterns and other times they don't. It's the whole cause and effect thing in a nutshell.
This is the current chart of the vortex :-
Elongated and slightly displaced, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The GFS ► though has been showing height rises over the weekend and into next week for the past few runs now, but once again, unless this propagates down to the surface over the coming week or two then it's a case as business as usual.
The latest GFS ► charts show not much changing for the surface charts over the next week or so. We have low pressure up near Iceland/Greenland which feeds in moisture and some colder air to the Northwest, but the block to the East holds pretty firm and keeps the colder air just to the East of the UK :-
Even towards the back end of next week and it's a case of cool zonality with low pressure near Greenland and Iceland trying to send colder air in from the Northwest, but this airmass is hugely modified at the base and affects us as a wintry mix but nothing too noteworthy :-
Into the second half of the month and the models still hold on to a similar pattern. It will be interesting to see whether the GFS ► is right with the forecast for the developments across the Arctic and whether this in turn does propagate into surface pattern changes, but if 2017/18 thus far has been anything to go by then the effects will be much further East and West of the UK, but we should have a better idea later this week and into the weekend as to whether the global models want to pick up on it.
METEOROLOGIST : MARSH |