When I issued my summer forecast back on the 31 March I stated that if the drought continued, we could see one very warm and dry summer with a significant heat wave sometime in June, July or August with strong correlation between the dry soil and atmosphere. I also stated however that a lot depended upon how the spring would turn out. It could go either way because if we happen to have a very wet spring which of course we have done, then we were much more likely to have a 50-50 or very average summer.
I have to admit, what I didn’t take into account at the time of my forecast was the fact the El Nino was coming on on the heels of a back to back La Nina. This can support a return to wetter conditions for the UK and other parts of the world which have been suffering drought. A good example of this is Texas, The East and now the Southeast US.
Before we get too dissapointed in what we’ve seen so far, don’t be. It is still way too early to write off summer but what I will say is this, we are going to have an average summer at best with a few warm spells in between unsettled and cooler spells.
Although we can’t rely on this rather simplistic NAO rule I have, however I do think it has a degree of merit, certainly up until now it has anyway. The rule is that each time the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) has went POSITIVE which supports a trough over the North Atlantic while ridging positions over the UK and Ireland, we warm up and turn more settled. The last time the NAO was positive, we saw that glorious spell of warmth. Since then the NAO tanked into such a negative dip that had we saw that back in January, we would have likely endured a brutal spell of winter. As per usual, it just so happens that we see these big dips outwith the time it matters.
Many of you have been asking lately, when are we going to see a return to warmer weather again. Apart from the period between May 18-28, it has been rather dissapointing for sure with a soaking April and cold, wet first 18 days of May.
As you can see from the below NAO forecast ensemble, we should see a return to neutral by the 20th ‘hopefully’ even positive by the later part of June and this could support more ridging over the UK again. I admit, this ensemble has trended later for recovering the NAO from it’s negative tanking and so the cool, unsettled and trough dominated pattern may last longer and beyond the 20th.
(Courtesy of NOAA)
My overall thinking towards the July and August period is that we’re likely to see a few short lived warm-ups dominated by longer spells of cool and unsettled weather through July and August but that doesn’t mean we can’t get some decent heat when we do see the flip back and forth. The above normal conditions may ease over eastern Europe during the later half of the summer and so the next 4 weeks may remain just as warm as it has been. The hottest spell yet will setup from Libya to NW Russia through days 5-7 before backing west across Poland and Germany. There remains a question as to just how far west the heat pushes back and whether we may get in on this warmth by perhaps next weekend.
As for thw CFS chart below. These are 2 metre temperature anomalies for June through November. Notice there is little WARMTH depicted across Europe during July, August and so this suggests a back and forth of the ridge-trough cycle with little to write home about.
Little warmth is depicted on these charts (courtesy of CFS) for the next few months over Europe.
Soon I will show you the CFS and JAMSTEC model depiction for the upcoming winter. These model runs get updated and so through the later part of summer and especially into autumn, I will frequently show you these maps and we can look at what may be brewing for this upcoming winter.
If you want to know what I think about this upcoming winter.. well I think it will be very different to last, put it that way!
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