This is my forecast. Please bear in mind that it is not especially aimed at meteorology experts, more my friends and general public, and also I localise it for my area, Reading/Berkshire. I do not cover the whole UK. I do not have a meteorology degree or the awe-inspiring knowledge of many on here. It is mostly based on 10 years of following models and knowledge gained from websites such as The Weather Outlook.
I guess I should stop sitting on my Summer forecast and publish it. These are my initial thoughts, I probably will refine and update it in a couple of weeks.
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I like to issue my long-range forecasts before the tiny handful of other forecasters I respect publish theirs so I do not get influenced away from my thoughts. I have seen a wide variety of forecasts for this summer from other amateurs, from the dire to the sublime. Most reasonable forecasters are still hedging their bets from what I see, with good reason.
Firstly I should review my Spring forecast.
“March I think will be generally cool or cold at times for the first half, with further snowfalls and frost likely but will switch to a warmish spell in the last 10 days - possibly reaching 20'C in the south. The warmish spell I expect will last at least 5 of the last 10 days. Drier than average though I expect a brief wet spell between the cold and warmish spells.
April I also feel will be much nicer than 2012, not quite on a par with 2011 but good overall. Again drier than average.
May back to the monsoon.”
The first half of March I was spot on – the second, erm, pretty damn wrong. April I emphasised how dry it would be, and I was spot on. May I went for cool and wet – it hasn’t been as wet as I had expected (although we have a week left for that to change!). I am happy in general – I would rate that around 75% accurate.
Average is the predominant word for the coming season, in my opinion. Which is a far better prospect than the last 6 summers.
So for June. I expect the predominant weather to be high pressure to the north of Scotland, with the Jetstream pattern fluctuating from France, bringing showers at times, and a split pattern with it going far north of Iceland and far south of Spain, giving more settled periods. My estimate is a week on-week off kind of pattern. One week of mostly cool, unsettled weather, followed by a week of fine, quite warm, if not exactly glorious weather. Overall, average temperatures, slightly above average rainfall and slightly below average sunshine. I am 65% confident of this solution. Other options remain on the table – a 10% chance of mostly wet and miserable, a 25% mostly chance of hot and sunny. Head to Scotland for the best weather.
July. Oh July. I got truly soaked last July. This July, I am expecting high pressure to be predominant over Scandinavia for much of the month, with the Azores high to our south-west also ridging in. This would mean a good proportion of the month with hot and sunny weather. Equally I do except near-average rainfall too, sometimes with imported continental or home-grown downpours/thunderstorms, at other times cooler, fresher weather with some rain/showers temporarily displacing the high pressure. More dry days than wet days at around 70% dry days. The beginning of the month probably the driest part – the end of the month the wettest. Overall I expect above-average temperatures, slightly below-average rainfall, above-average sunshine. There are a lot of indicators to this solution but common sense and recent history suggests to me that I am being way too optimistic. But I am confident of this solution at around 80%.
August will most likely carry on as July finished – unsettled. The Jetstream will most likely resume its trajectory of recent summers towards the UK. The first part of the month I believe will see some good sunny, warm days but finished off with heavy downpours and thunderstorms. As the month goes on, increasingly less sunshine with low pressure troughs situated close to or over the UK bringing several days of rain or showers, below-average temperatures with just a handful of decent days. Overall average temperatures but warmer at first, average sunshine and above-average rainfall. I am 60% confident for August.
I may as well touch on autumn and winter as they are normally far easier to predict in advance.
Hurricanes are not my speciality but the only forecaster whose word I treat as gospel and would force me to change my forecast is a guy called Joe ******i. Based in America and more famed for his anti global-warming rants roughly event 10 minutes on his Twitter feed, totally drowning out the snippets of incredibly useful weather information which for Europe are now as rare as a transexual hen’s teeth unless you pay a monthly subscription. He was the one who put me onto the idea of cold winters back in 2007/08 when everyone else said that global warming meant we would only experience snow in virtual reality machines.
The useful snippet of information that I gleaned from the mass of 140-characters is the expectation for a busy hurricane season on the Atlantic coast. Which in my limited experience of tracking hurricanes means one of two things for the UK as the summer ends, depending on the jetstream track. A Jetstream to the north of the UK will send the remnants of hurricanes far north, bringing those very warm, even hot Septembers and sometimes also Octobers. A Jetstream pattern straight towards the UK will just bring us more rain and wind. So September I believe will be either hot or wet, depending on how the Jetstream is functioning.
Initial thoughts for latter part of the year are October unsettled, November dry, December unsettled with the rest of winter cold. But there is much to play for before then and that is only a guide on current expectations and I will be surprised if everything I have predicted for the months before comes true.
Sometimes it is impossible to forecast two days away, and I find long-range forecasts far harder for summer than any other period – I do suffer from over-optimism at times in life so it does concern me that I am forecasting the best summer since 2006!
Fingers crossed I at least get July right.
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I look forward to all the other forecasters. Good luck.