In moderate to strong El Nino years gone by, often the heart of the winter produces little snow and cold and is dominated by mild, unsettled but these non El Nino winters have been know to bring unusually cold springs. 2016 will be remembered for a largely non winter followed by winter conditions through mid and late April.

Classic -NAO following strong SSWE supports a warm Greenland and cold Eastern North America, Western Europe.

Yesterday morning you could have been forgiven into thinking the weather forecast for the coming day was an archive from a day back in January.

Met Office Yellow Warnings for snow issued.

When waking up and commuting, well if it doesn’t look like January, it certainly felt like it. Snow affecting travel in many parts of Scotland extending down into Northern England this morning.

Pretty decent snow covering the relatively low elevated Campsie Hills for this late in April.

With an August strength sun, this snow will be gone in a matter of hours!

With a gusty east wind combined with air temp of only 0 to 5C, we are dealing with a significant wind chill out there.

[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)]

The cold is living on borrowed time as the Atlantic flow is gathering pace and is set to throw a series of lows in over the UK starting late this weekend.

On the whole, this shift means milder with the removal of arctic brand air but not necessarily warm either. However, an active westerly flow at this time of year means building warmth can lift northward from Iberia AHEAD of each system and that is likely to bring the UK’s first 21+C reading next week.

With the return of an active low pressure pattern comes a more up and down temperature regime with warmth ahead followed by cold behind. The back and fourth should temper our mean temperature at or perhaps a little below normal through the first half of May but there’s opportunity to see Southern England and Wales warm into the low 20s on a few occasions next week.

As you can see from the below GFS ensemble 5-day mean 2m temp anomalies that yes, the cold pulls back significantly but we look to remain average to slightly below average over the next 10 days but there are hints towards mid May that a warmer pattern may develop.

See today’s video.

I’m attending a wedding tomorrow so will not have a post till Sunday morning.

[/s2If][s2If current_user_cannot(access_s2member_level1)][magicactionbox id=”18716″][/s2If]