United Kingdom & Ireland

Drive a powerful jet stream into a trough that’s surrounded by high pressure and you get STORM ALEX. A rapid deepener with severe and far reaching impacts across Europe. Finding itself directly beneath the ‘cloud hook’ and potential sting jet, the exposed island of Belle-Île-en-Mer off Brittany recorded a record wind gust of 116 mph while […]

All we seem to hear about these days is record, unprecedented heat, floods, droughts and storms. I don’t think we can deny, our planet has warmed over the last 30 years. Whether man-made or otherwise, towns and cities never mind countries, we hear less and less cold records falling. Since about 2014, Northern Ireland’s climate […]

Like August and much of the summer, September has been a month of mixed fortune with settled spells interrupted by more unsettled. May and September are often thought of as being the ‘best month’s of the year’ but this didn’t really apply in 2020. Despite the UK see it’s first September 30C in 3 years […]

Low pressure developed over England along a notable southbound cold front and deepened into quite the cyclone over the North Sea and just offshore of East Anglia. This feature, visible on the below visible satellite images brought a wild past 24 hours for East Anglia and Southeast. It brought a triple whammy with within a 24 hour […]

The hyper active tropics is not only allowing amplification of the mid latitude pattern but driving highs into unfamiliar territory! The high latitudes! Hurricane Teddy looks to break away from the pack and run a due north course up into eastern Canada. This force high pressure north creating a downstream buckling and allowing the first […]

This past week, NASA revealed that solar cycle 25 has officially begun and that cycle 24 ended back in December 2019 when it reached a minimum. Solar cycle 24 reached it’s maximum back in April 2014. Solar cycle 23 ended and cycle 24 commenced back in late 2008 with Britain’s coldest winter since 1978-79 occurring […]

We have quite the interesting weather pattern this weekend thanks to low pressure to the north and high pressure to the south and a strong zonal jet stream roaring in between. Here was this afternoon’s visible satellite imagery below showing cloudless skies over southern Britain while gale-force winds and persistent rain affected Scotland, even Northern […]

The summer of 2020 will likely be remembered for the period between July 30 and August 10. It was between these dates an this brief period in which historic heat occurred. Otherwise it was a rather changeable and often cool, damp summer. Here’s how the 500mb geopotential height anomaly has looked for summer 2020. In […]

Summer 2020 will be remembered as ‘very changeable’ but with extremes of wet, cool and hot. In terms of 500mb pattern, the summer forecast has been good with low pressure the rule. Actual 500mb geopotential anomaly from 1 June – 10 Aug. While June was slightly warmer-than-average, July was slightly below average and as forecast, the […]
Recent Comments