May 2026 shall open warm and sunny with widespread low 20s up and down the British Isles with even warm into France and Iberia while it’s wintry on the opposite end of the continent.
26/27C possible in SE England Friday.
However, this warm and dry West/cold, wet East contrast looks to quickly even itself out through the early May bank Holiday weekend and beyond.
Below is the past 10 day precip & temp anomaly verses.
Below is the upcoming 7 followed by 7-14 day off CFSv2.
Note beginning of the upcoming 7 day continues warm and dry then change comes through 2nd half of the period and reflected more in the 8-14 day.
Cool, wet signal even holds week 3.
A rather drastic shift over the USA will bring the change on the this side of the Atlantic with lowering of pressure and return to a much cooler and more changeable regime.
A complex battle between residual cold and building warmth looks to bring ups and downs.
It’s unclear whether this shift from seemingly ‘weeks of high pressure’ to ‘less settled’ will prove temporary or a fundamental shift towards wetter again but this broader-scale flip can likely be attributed to the early March SSW and MJO progression from Pacific through Atlantic.
It’s a tough to call looking beyond a week to 10 days at the best of times but more so as we enter late spring and momentum weakens. However, there’s disagreement between GFS ens vs ECM. Even the slightest of differences can make for very different outcomes in the weekly output of models.
The 30 day shows more agreement put not exact! See video for more on this.
30 day precip and even temp anomalies are similar but there’s warmer north/southwest with GFS while ECM is pretty cool across most of Europe. Too cool? Probably.
There’s a lean towards 2 troughs, 1st stretching from Iceland to Norway and 2nd Azores through Iberia perhaps extending into Med with ridging in between hence wet north and south with dry/cool slice in between but expect north-south variability to this…
CFSv2 isn’t buying the cool central swath of Europe May. Near average temps for UK away from SE and wet?
So what do I go for overall?
The Verdict…
While I went from wet NW, drier SE and near average for UK in April and it turned out warm, I am going with near average to above for UK temperature-wise with below average rain in North, wetter South UK. As for Europe? Wet south/drier North and cool South, Warm North. Heat surges late month?
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