Dark clouds to clear before Prince’s big day
WHENEVER you are planning a big day that is weather-dependent, the sun has an annoying habit of peaking a few days too early, leaving you anxiously wondering if the clement conditions are going to last.
The good news for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle next weekend is that the preceding days are going to be pretty average, leaving plenty of room to get the bad stuff out of the way so that Saturday can be a perfect late spring royal wedding.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Today will see that slowmoving weather front, laden with rain, that spoilt yesterday continuing to creep its way out over eastern England towards the North Sea in no hurry. The northern extreme of it will prove notably hard to budge, so Scotland will suffer the worst of the rain, but by mid-afternoon East Anglia at least may start to see some brightness.
It is a day, though, for low expectations. The average May temperature is 64F (18C), but nowhere is going to make the mark. London will do best at 61F (16C), with Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff not far behind at 57F (14C), and Plymouth and Belfast off the pace at 55F (13C).
By tomorrow, most of the rain should have gone in the East, leaving behind a still, sunny day, with temperatures beginning to creep up.
Much, as ever, depends on the position, up in the high atmosphere, of the jet stream. It is prone to kinks and, depending on whether it is north of us or south of us, we either suck up warm air from the Continent or draw down colder air from the Arctic. And it can be very hard to predict its movements seven days in advance.
The best guess at the moment is that Saturday will see us on the warm side of the line, with any rain confined to northern England and Scotland. In Windsor, the bride and groom should be able to climb into their open-top, horse-drawn carriage without so much as a nervous glance at the skies.