One thing I detest about our modern day southerly tracking low pressure systems such as what has been around just recently (and of which, there are one of two more to come this week including the remnants of an Atlantic tropical storm) is the path that they usually always seem to take these days.
Year ago, these systems would have come far enough north to affect the south of Scotland at least, and we would have been virtually guaranteed some wet and miserable weather from that with a number of days which would be a complete write-off as a result.
However, that hasn't happened for a very long time now and because of that, we actually have to go back a number of years to find the last occasion where this resulted in rain hanging around here throughout an entire day, as appears to be common in a number of places further south these days.
The reason why that is the case is because these systems always seem to be on a more southerly track than what they used to take. This means that the worst of the rain will usually avoid here altogether, but those systems will still often be close enough to us to make it dull and overcast here.
This leaves us too close to these systems for us to still get be able to get away with a reasonably sunny day and yet, it is in that sunnier weather to the north, where showers are more likely to appear as we have also seen in recent days. Here, the odd shower might occur from that if we are lucky, but the closeness of these systems tend to dampen down the convection currents which lead to any showers developing, due to that resulting cloud cover.
That in turn, is one major factor which results in Edinburgh (and not Aberdeen, which is more likely to at least get some showery activity within that clearer air mass as Richard from Aberdeen reported on yesterday's CC thread) being one of the most boring parts of the UK on average when it comes to our weather.
Furthermore, that also goes completely against the so-called NW/SE split which a lot of people always talk about but such a weather pattern actually usually results in most of England being wetter than here in Edinburgh as a result of what is happening which is a pattern which seems to have become more common in recent years, as there also appears to be more of those southerly tracking lows around these days, which usually always take a similar path.
The north of Edinburgh, usually always missing out on snow events which occur not just within the rest of Scotland or the UK, but also within the rest of Edinburgh.