As I kept harping on about for the past week to 10 days, warmer air is on the way to Britain and Ireland as the low which brought all the fun and games over recent days slides south and as it does so, drives a trough into Iberia, even Northwest Africa. As a result, hot air is being projected north into central parts of the continent and as the low cuts off from the main upper flow and fronts slide NE to SW over the UK, much warmer air will be introduced by Sunday into early next week. This was forecasted since last weekend and the model is seeing what it originally had nearly 10 days ago.

The latest ECMWF suggests Sunday warms up. However, warm air travelling across cold North Sea waters means mostly cloudy, misty, murky skies but at least we should heat up some.

Check this out for Sunday. Notice the warm air wrapping around the northern side of the cut off low, the same upper low which brought down cold, even helped support snow for some.

As you can see, the upper low is over England, Wales and much of Ireland but easterly winds driving into Northern parts will not be a cold wind but rather a warming one.

Monday

Notice the ECMWF kicks the upper low further south and east allowing warmer air to cover the UK, although it’s not a particularly sunny setup early next week, it’s a warming one nonetheless and an improving one.

By Tuesday, even warmer air is over the UK and Ireland and with low pressure well out of the way, I would suspect a possibility of brightening skies. There’s no deneying however that this setup can be stubborn in terms of lack of sun, but if you get any sun with the 850 temps the model has for Tuesday, then we may be looking at the warmest day of 2013. Could see 24C in Scotland, 25C in England and 23C in Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Tuesday

As expected, the model is picking up on the arrival of another system out of the NW by Wednesday with the return of cooler air.

Wednesday

By Thursday the model sees another vigorous upper low with tightly packed isobars back over UK airspace. More wind, rain and cold temperatures for the time of year.

Thursday

I’ve been looking at the trend of the NAO closely in recent days to try and gage when we may see some real summer weather and by that I mean a decent sustained 5+ day period of warm sunny conditions. Unfortunately I just don’t see it over the next 2 or 3 weeks which would take us into the first week of June. I come to that conclusion because the NAO ensemble remains in a generally downward sloping trend and that trend means more in the way of troughiness and less ridging.

My May outlook always called for below normal temperatures overall and that looks likely, however I admit it’s somewhat wetter than I expected. I expected the NAO to hold more towards negative which would keep a trough, not a ridge in the means. My hunch is that May will continue to be mainly unsettled with a limited few days here and there where we manage to get some warmth from a more southerly source region, only to get wiped out by an approaching front.

Until that NAO goes positive in a significant way, I do not see any sign of true summer. In saying that, while I think this weather continues into at least the first week of June, i am swaying towards a possible spike mid to late June with perhaps our first sustained spell of warm, sunny and settled weather sometime between June 10 through 20.

Here’s the NAO ensemble. Not an aweful lot to go by.

Hope to have a video up in the NEW VIDEO PLAYER (scroll down the homepage and click on videos) shortly, stay tuned.
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