Crossing The AtlanticAdded : Thursday at 13:35 There is a general misconception that the weather which the US gets, the UK tends to see a couple of weeks later. Most nans (who are qualified meteorologists of course) would proudly confirm that when New York sees snow then "Well, we will see that in a week or two!".
Obviously, in the Autumn months we have remnants of tropical systems washing up on our shores which can indeed cross the Atlantic, albeit becoming vast shadows of the systems they once were.
But with the major winter storm across the Eastern coast of the USA over the Christmas period, well... what happened to that? Shall we ask our nan or a meteorologist? Nan reckons it's coming... But here is the meteorologists view....
If you take a look at the USA today then you can see warmer air now moving in across Eastern areas of the USA. Elliott has completely dissipated and now replaced by high pressure :-
So, the system itself has no chance of reaching us as it no longer even exists, but look at the upper level jet patterns. You can see the trough which helped develop Elliott now South of Greenland :-
Over the next few days and the trough crosses the Atlantic and now moves across the UK for the start of next week :-
This is called a Rossby Wave and is the basic movement of troughs and ridges in the upper atmosphere from West to East. If you take a look at the surface chart for the UK next week then we do indeed have low pressure across the UK :-
But there is no screaming Northerly or anything remotely similar. So, whilst the general pattern may well take a week or so to move across the Atlantic, the actual weather is completely different. Not to mention that even if colder air did cross the Atlantic then by the time it reached us the boundary layer would be so heavily modified that there would be virtually nothing left of the original airmass.
So, to all the nans out there who think we get the same weather as New York a couple of weeks after? Sorry, it's bit of a myth... But Red Sky at Night and all that? Yeah, that works...
METEOROLOGIST : MARSH |