High pressure and a weatherman’s headache…

On Friday evening I tweeted that the weather would reach an interesting fork in the road this week and that it could get exciting.

In response I quickly had a barrage of tweets asking what lay ahead and, rather cheekily, I said that I would ponder over my thoughts through the weekend and not say much until Monday.

Well, Monday has arrived and as promised, I’m about to reveal all – although the title of this blog may have already given you a flavour of how uncertain the weather situation later this week remains.

As a weather forecaster, despite often presenting one outcome to you, I’m often juggling a few possible outcomes in my head. Using experience and help of the weather computer models, I then deliver the most likely outcome.

The difficulty later this week is that a small difference in where high pressure moves will have a huge influence on the type of weather that we experience into February.

So, I think the easiest thing to do is explain the two possible outcomes that could occur later this week and then give an update as to which looks the most likely as we get closer to the time.

Scenario 1 – high pressure to south of the UK

If high pressure lies to the south of the UK at the end of the week, then given that the wind flows around high pressure in a clockwise direction in the northern hemisphere, winds will be from a south westerly direction.

This means that the air will be coming from the Azores, as it was just over a week ago, bringing us warm air, cloud and some rain, with temperatures in the range of 10-13C.

Scenario 2 – high pressure to the north of the UK

If high pressure lies to the north of the UK at the end of the week, this will open the door to a cold easterly wind from continental Europe.

Initially, the air wouldn’t be that cold, but given the set-up could persist for some time, it would turn progressively colder with a chance of snow – especially for eastern parts of the UK.

What do I think will happen?

I think it’s highly likely that the weather at the end of this week will turn settled, with high pressure drifting across the UK bringing bright days and chilly nights with patchy frost and fog.

The bit that I’m not sure about is what happens beyond this point into the early part of next week.

As always, as soon as I see any hints of a more concrete signal of what’s to come, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, I’ll no doubt be bouncing thoughts around Twitter with other members of the meteorological community. If you fancy joining in or just observing, you can follow me – @liamdutton