Last year was a good summer down in England up until some point during July when everything then went downhill even down there.

Originally Posted by: johncs2016 

That's not really true - August was sunnier than average here, with average temperatures. It was wetter than average, but over 40mm of that fell on one day from a thunderstorm, so it didn't feel wet.

I think down south August wasn't very good, with less sunshine than average. 

I'd say summer 2017 was okay but that's it. June was the best month relative to average.

Originally Posted by: LeedsLad123 

GEFS not remarkable but they don't tell the whole story.  I'm starting to wonder whether we're heading for a historic spell of fine weather.

Originally Posted by: Brian Gaze 

Is the May NAO still factored into the Met Office winter forecast ?

Originally Posted by: Gusty 

Its been remarkably dry up here since the start of the year, very little in the way of rain, hosepipe bans could be become a feature as we head into Summer perhaps.

Originally Posted by: Solar Cycles 

I think the rest of May can pretty much be ruled out for any significant rainfall, apart from the odd thundery low trying to push into southern areas.

We could indeed be beginning a very dry spell of weather, and I welcome it especially moving into summer! It's even more when you consider that so many notable weather events this decade have been because of copious rainfall rather than a lack of it, so it would be a nice change.

Originally Posted by: Bolty 

On the contrary. If you run through TWO's GFS rainfall prediction for the next two weeks, there appears to be a heck of a lot of heavy rain around, mostly in the form of showers no doubt, but quite copious amounts of rainfall on many days if that is to be believed.

Originally Posted by: moomin75 

As far as I’m aware they still take it into consideration.

Originally Posted by: Solar Cycles 

Where showers and thunderstorms develop they will bring heavy rain, but it will only be localised. There is no real sign of any significant widepsread rainfall. For the most part it's dry.

Originally Posted by: Bolty 

Thanks. I should imagine the NAO will end up fairly negative based on the recent and forthcoming output. Obviously many many pieces go into the jigsaw but this would favour a colder than average winter. This is for another thread though. 

Originally Posted by: Gusty 

An easterly at this time of year wouldn't be very good for this part of the world either or anywhere down the east coast of both Scotland and England for that matter. If the air from the near continent is dry enough, we would probably still get some sunny afternoons once any low cloud and east coast haar had burned off, due to that strong sunshine at this time of year (by the time in question, we will then just be less than a month away from the summer solstice).

However, I would imagine that it could get a bit depressing after a while seeing every morning start off with that easterly muck in the form of low cloud and/or haar, resulting in yet more grey skies  and another permacast hell. Furthermore, that cool wind from straight in off the North Sea would mean that it would never actually get all that warm here, even if the Sun does break through in the afternoon.

We had plenty of that easterly stuff at the very end of the winter and during the first half of this spring, so we could probably do without getting even more of that as we head towards the start of the actual summer. If we do though, I'm sure that we will be hearing plenty more from Richard from Aberdeen on this subject.

Originally Posted by: johncs2016 

 Yes, this coming week is not looking good at all. After recording 76.5 hours sun in the past six days.

Originally Posted by: richardabdn 

What I can remember about last August was that it was wetter than average overall here in Edinburgh, but the beginning of August was wetter than the end of it. This meant that whilst we were already fairly close to the 1981-2010 average well before the end of that month, it was a bit of struggle on the end to get over that finishing line although we did just get there in the end.

The reason for that though, wasn't really because we were going on any sort of extended dry spells. What actually happened was that we kept on getting the same frequency of official rain days (a rain day being defined as one where we get 1 mm or more of rain), but the amounts of rain which we were getting on those days was now much smaller.

This meant that it was wetter than average during that month both in terms of the actual rainfall amounts, and in terms of the number of official rain days and since that was true during the rest of the summer months as well in this part of the world, that made for a rather poor summer overall.

Nevertheless, that relatively dry second half of August did mark the beginning of a drying trend overall, which then led us into a dry autumn (albeit with a slightly wetter than average September) followed by a drier than average winter where January was then, the only wetter than average month.

Originally Posted by: johncs2016 

Wow! GFS 12z brings the blowtorch into the south next Saturday! 

Originally Posted by: Brian Gaze 

GFS this afternoon is showing a run of very high minimum temperatures for the south, end May-beginning June. Chance of a May min record being broken?

Originally Posted by: Bertwhistle 

Quite the opposite for us, but things have started to dry out properly now over the last few weeks. Lengthy dry spells are very normal from May to September down here so parched landscapes are nothing unusual. Let's hope come July the common isn't lush green :(

Originally Posted by: picturesareme 

On the contrary. If you run through TWO's GFS rainfall prediction for the next two weeks, there appears to be a heck of a lot of heavy rain around, mostly in the form of showers no doubt, but quite copious amounts of rainfall on many days if that is to be believed.

Originally Posted by: moomin75 

Don't be the bloomin' gloomin Moomin...

Originally Posted by: Nick Gilly