Let the battle of the air masses commence

At the beginning of the week I explained on my blog that there was a huge amount of uncertainty in the forecast beyond the forthcoming weekend. I had hoped by now that things would be a little clearer, but alas this hasn’t proved to be the case.

There’s still a large variation in the weather computer models into next week about how far west cold air will reach. Effectively the UK will become a battleground between cold polar continental air to the east and mild tropical maritime air to the west.

This brings two main points of discussion for our weather over the next couple of days – how cold will it get and which places are likely to get some snow?

Let’s deal with the snow risk first of all. The tropical maritime air mass to the west of us is laden with moisture which would normally fall as rain. However, because it could potentially bump into the cold polar continental air mass, there is a risk that it will turn to snow.

Whilst the detail is very tricky to pin down at the moment, it looks like there is a risk of snow across central parts of the UK during Sunday and into Monday – especially over the hills. This comes with the big caveat that this is subject to change and it is worth staying in touch with the latest forecast for updates.

The next point of debate is how cold it will get. My feeling at this stage is that the cold air will eventually win the battle, albeit only just, pushing the milder air to the west of the UK.

Initially temperatures won’t be that low, but through next week it’s likely to turn progressively colder with widespread, hard frosts by night and sunshine by day. Daytime temperatures are likely to be around 1C to 4C, with temperatures at night widely falling to between -1C and -6C.

Another factor that’s likely to accentuate the cold, especially for England and Wales, will be a brisk, biting easterly wind.

Finally, there’s been a lot of talk in the newspapers today that the cold weather is set to last for a month.

Whilst the cold weather may persist for some time, given the huge amount of uncertainty with the shorter term forecast, such bold predictions at this stage need to be treated with care and caution.

It’s also worth adding that at the moment, the impending spell of colder weather doesn’t look like being anywhere near the scale of what happened last winter.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on developments through the weekend and will be tweeting updates on Twitter. If you’d like to join in the discussion, then you can join me – @liamdutton

You can also stay up to date on the website at channel4.com/weather