Britons may not have had much to smile about weather-wise recently – having endured the coldest summer for three years – but things are set to change with a week of sunshine and warm temperatures before unsettled weather returns.
“No one can deny that we have had a pretty disappointing summer with a lot of unsettled weather and only a few warm spells, especially through July and August,” said Prof Dame Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s chief scientist.
“Our weather has been dominated by low pressure over and to the west of the country that has brought us periods of heavy rain from the south – what we call the Spanish plume.”
But, for this week, Britons can enjoy generally dry and settled days with sunny spells, with temperatures reaching 21C (70F) in London, before unsettled conditions return.
Leon Brown, of the Weather Channel, said: “There is an unsettled weather pattern from next week, so no Indian summer, although this week it will be fine and warmer on Thursday and Friday in the east. Make the most of the fine weather this week since, from next week onwards, the weather will become a lot more unpredictable and unsettled.”
As for the summer that has come and gone, provisional figures for the meteorological summer from 1 June to 31 August show the UK mean temperature for this summer was 13.9C. This was 0.4C below the 1981-2010 long-term average.
Rainfall overall was slightly higher than average, with the UK having seen 272mm of rain – 13% above the long-term average. Across southern and eastern England, the rain often came from short, heavy downpours, although there were some fine, dry days.
The Met Office attributed the unsettled summer to El Niño – the warming of sea surface temperature that occurs every few years, typically concentrated in the central-east equatorial Pacific.
“The low pressure that has dominated our weather is part of a pattern of waves in the jet stream around the world that has brought crippling heatwaves to places like Poland and Japan,” said Slingo on the Met news blog.
“And, looking back over past El Niños, you could have expected that a more unsettled summer might be on the cards for the UK. Closer to home, the North Atlantic is more than 2 degrees colder than normal. It seems quite likely that the unusually cold North Atlantic has strengthened and pushed our jet stream south, also contributing to the low pressure systems that have dominated our weather.”
She suggested that forecasters were caught out this summer. “Seasonal forecasts for this summer suggested that temperatures and rainfall would be near normal,” she said. “However, as the season progressed, all the leading models around the world failed to capture the signal for unsettled weather over the UK.”
