Is the rest of this summer heading for a washout? There have been some rather alarming news headlines about the Met Office predicting a very wet August, although its forecast for the whole month paints a rather more nuanced picture, with a mixture of sunshine and showers across the country.
However, the best of any dry warm spells are likely to come in the southeast and the most frequent rains in the northwest — and this was precisely the prediction for the entire summer that the Met Office gave in May.
July was interesting. The first half of the month was largely dry and warm across much of England and Wales, although there was a split across the UK, with the northwest much wetter and cooler. At about the middle of the month it turned far wetter and cooler everywhere. Although July’s rainfall ended up way above average, during the month it remained warmer than normal, boosted by the hot weather in early July before the temperatures tumbled.
To heap on even more misery, the downturn in weather happened just as the schools broke up for the summer holidays, since when it has become an exasperating game of trying to dodge the showers, one eye on the sky and the other on online forecasts. But is this turn in the weather really so shocking?
The summer of ten years ago was far more dramatic, being one of the wettest on record in the UK, as two episodes of colossal rains in June and July brought widespread flooding in which 13 people died. Thousands more were made homeless.
Advertisement
The heavy rain was delivered by an unusually vigorous jet stream, the ribbon of strong winds high in the atmosphere that help develop depressions; because the jet stream was unusually strong for summer, depressions near the UK were more intense and some of them pulled in the very warm, moist air, generating the exceptionally heavy and intense deluges of rain.
