Summer’s here ... but it might not last the week
IT IS the end of the school summer term for those who managed to make it back into the classrooms in the age of Covid, and so the time when we expect the summer weather to put its best foot forward.
We have learnt by experience not to hope for too much, but this weekend and the early part of the week should offer some gentle encouragement. After that it could go either way.
The weather front that has been slowly sliding down the UK since Friday, with accompanying rain, will more or less have departed by this morning. The less is East Anglia and the South East, where it may linger long enough to make it a dank start, but by the middle of the day the fresher, sunnier and drier conditions enjoyed by much of the rest of the country will have arrived. It won’t be especially hot – 21C (70F) in London, 20C (68F) in Cardiff, 17C (63F) for the rest of England and Wales, and 16C (61F) in the central belt of Scotland.
The first half of the week is looking equally promising – more of the same, with plenty of sunshine and very little rain as high pressure out to the south west brings mild, settled conditions and warmer air from the Azores.
Will it manage to last the week? The jury is out. In the Atlantic a series of low-pressure systems, bringers of rain and cool, are menacing – by Wednesday they may have pushed the high pressure aside.
It will be one more uncertainty to live with, but we are getting good at that in these unprecedented times. And we could be coping with the Siberian heatwave or the storm surges off the coast of eastern Australia that have seen whole beaches washed away.