Why winter may yet have an icy sting in its tail
SPRING, what spring? With a rainy, windy and – in most parts of Britain – unseasonably chilly weekend set to stick around into the working week, some forecasters are talking about us facing a repeat of 2013’s wintry spring, when the seasons got muddled up and April temperatures dropped at low as 12F (-11C).
Nothing quite so extreme today, however. Indeed, it may even be a notch up on yesterday with 50F (10C) in London, 48F (9C) in Plymouth and 45F (7C) in Belfast and Glasgow. If the southern half of the country, including Wales, has a slight edge in temperature terms, it will pay for it by experiencing the bulk of the rain.
Monday will dawn with little respite, as a new band of rain heads in from the south-west, with clouds arriving on the prevailing westerly wind blowing in off the Atlantic.
And that is the pattern for the rest of the week, thanks to our old friend the jet stream, the ribbon of air in the high atmosphere that travels west to east from America. When it is to the south of us, it sucks in cold air from the Arctic over the UK. When it is to the north, we benefit from milder conditions. This week it is going to be somewhere in between.
But perhaps we should be counting our blessings. The figures have just been published for the winter months, and they show that temperatures were higher than average across almost the whole of the UK. Usually, higher winter temperatures mean more rain, but winter 2016-17 was kind in this regard, with most of the country drier than average. This was down to the high pressure systems that, from December through to February, blocked the advance of rain-bearing low pressure from over the Atlantic.