danm

Let's hope so.

I agree, there is no "should be". An average is an average, sometimes colder, sometimes warmer. The problem isn't so much the temperatures - we've had cold spells in April before - it's the persistence of the duller and wetter than average weather that's the main problem. We just can't seem to get a stretch of dry and sunny weather at the moment. I accept that in late Autumn and winter, it's what the weather is like at that time of year, but by now you'd hope we would get something more consistently dry and sunny. The SSW definitely put a wrench in things and hasn't helped. I dreaded the talk at the end of Feb of an imminent SSW, knowing this would be the exact result of it. Not snowy mid March nirvana as many on the Mod thread were hoping for, but a perpetuating northern blocking pattern, shunting troughs into the mid latitudes giving us dull and damp weather.

B87 yeh i think it's highly likely that the late season SSW has perpetuated northern blocking. Low pressure is just getting stuck at mid latitudes.

lassie23 hard to say for sure, northern blocking is actually pretty common at this time of year, but I do think the SSW has enhanced and prolonged this pattern.

raz.org.rain warm, wet and thundery according to those charts.

Considering the May average is about 18c for London, temperature wise we look OK next week according to this with 17c to 19c. The problem is it also looks pretty unsettled...

The reason i'm arguing against that is we can get brilliant sunshine under a high in mid winter with cold upper air.

Yeh i don't think upper air temps had anything to do with the cloud, that was more to do with the positioning of the high.

Adding to this, our issue is also being surrounded on water on all sides. The only way to get crystal clear blue skies in this county is if a high is slap bang over us with 1025-1030mb pressure, or having a SE’erly airflow from off the near continent which drags in dry air, or from a northerly airstream in mid winter as we had in Jan. It’s much easier in continental locations as low cloud getting dragged in off a cold sea is much less of an issue. It’s not looking particularly good in the west either.

MP-R the high was centred over western Ireland so here in the east and over much of mainland UK in fact, we were on the eastern edge of the high, where pressure was lower. Not to mention an onshore breeze off the North Sea. You can have cold upper air temperatures too and brilliant sunshine, so long as pressure is high enough to kill off cloud formation and also not having an onshore breeze dragging in low cloud.

...we just need higher pressure. Things like infill, or clouding over, or afternoon showers will keep happening whilst we have relatively low pressure in charge. We need a solid high at or above 1025-1030mb. We haven't had that for any length of time since early January.

Derecho I'm sure that's coming our way. Forecast is for some rain later.

Well a proper sunny morning! Shame it won’t last though…

Yes exactly, I just don’t understand why the Met Office only publish the raw figures but not the corrected ones. Without that calculation you can never really know the exact actual sunshine hours for a particular location, unless you look at the anomaly maps which give a percentage range.

They really should release the actual figures. The raw numbers that are displayed on their own website plus others like meteociel and weather online are wrong and misleading. Still don’t understand why they don’t, considering they show the actual ranges on the anomaly maps.