This is an in-depth Met Office UK Weather forecast for the next week and beyond. March's sunshine has broken records but will April follow suit? Bringing you this deep dive is Met Office meteorologist Aidan McGivern.
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00:00Spring sunshine. How sunny has it been? How sunny will it be? And why is it so sunny at the moment?
00:09I'll be answering those questions in this week's Met Office Deep Dive. Thank you for joining me.
00:14I hope you enjoy these in-depth weather discussions we have each Tuesday on the Met Office YouTube channel.
00:19If you do enjoy these and you've not subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, I do encourage you to do so.
00:25It will, well, allow us to make more of this sort of thing in the future.
00:29And share the love. Tell your friends all about these. Send us a comment, send us a question.
00:34We do read them and we do try and respond to your comments as well.
00:38Now, I promise the next 20 minutes won't be 20 minutes of showing you blank weather maps.
00:44Although it is tempting because there isn't much weather to talk about for the next few days.
00:48I'll keep that bit brief. I'm going to be talking predominantly about how sunny this spring has been so far.
00:54And looking further ahead, will the settled weather, will the high pressure, will the drier than average weather last throughout much of April and into the start of May?
01:03We'll be looking at that as well. So stay tuned. Lots to come and lots to cover in this week's Deep Dive.
01:10If I could, I'd move this outside and do it in the sunshine because it is beautiful out here in Exeter today.
01:17As it is across most of the UK, not everywhere, but most of the UK seeing sunny skies at long last, you might think.
01:24Because, of course, we had a spell of very wet weather, which I'm going to talk about as well, in the recent past.
01:32But that seems to be over now because March 2025, we can confirm today, was for England the sunniest March on record.
01:42And this map shows the rank for various counties across the UK.
01:47This colour here, the darkest orange, is where those counties ranked first in terms of sunshine.
01:54So basically that means that for many parts of the Midlands into eastern England, the southeast, it was the sunniest March on record.
02:03For parts of Wales, southwest England, it was the second or third or fourth sunniest March on record.
02:10Yeah, it's not been the same everywhere. Parts of northwest Scotland, northern Scotland, about average.
02:16And for the Outer Hebrides, actually ranking in the lower third in terms of sunshine.
02:22It's never the same story for everywhere in the UK, is it?
02:24So, yeah, northwest Scotland has been the place where the clouds have ended up, whereas the rest of the UK has been remarkably sunny for March.
02:34And remarkably dry. This shows the rainfall anomaly compared with the 91 to 2020 average.
02:41And you can see a similar distribution. So for parts of northern Scotland, the white colour indicating average rainfall or around average.
02:48There's a blue spot here in the northwest Highlands above average rainfall. That's the only place I can see.
02:54For the rest of the UK, we're in these browns, so below average rainfall for March.
02:59And the darker browns are across southern parts. So south Wales, mid Wales, parts of the west Midlands, East Anglia and southern England.
03:08Some places below 20% of the March rainfall. If I can remember correctly, it was 40-something for the whole of the UK, I believe, in terms of March rainfall.
03:18So less than 50% of the average rainfall spread across the UK for this March.
03:24And it's interesting to see where we are in terms of rainfall for the year so far.
03:28This graph shows the average line. That's the black line that goes up here for the whole year.
03:34You can see the months labelled on the bottom. We're up to the start of April.
03:39And so the average is around about 300 millimetres for the amount of rainfall up to the start of April.
03:46But the bottom black line here shows where we've actually ended up and there's a deficit.
03:52That's what this brown shading shows. There's a deficit.
03:55And we're actually running at 200 millimetres of rain up to the 1st of April when on average it would be 300 millimetres of rain.
04:06You might think that's a stark contrast to this time last year.
04:09And you'd be correct because this is the same graph for last year.
04:14Of course, all the other months have been filled in.
04:16But just focusing on up to the 1st of April, it's about 375, 380 millimetres.
04:22So above average rain, above that 300 millimetre average rather than below.
04:28Almost double the amount of rainfall in the same period last year compared with this year.
04:34And just switching back to the current average, that's 200 millimetres.
04:39Will that continue for the rest of the year?
04:41Because, of course, we stayed above there.
04:44We stayed with the blues above the average line there because of the very wet start to the year.
04:49And we had a question on the Weather Studio Live on Wednesday.
04:53If you don't know about the Weather Studio Live...
04:55Did I say Wednesday? Friday, I meant.
04:57Friday at 12.15 we do a Weather Studio Live.
04:59That's a live YouTube broadcast.
05:01If you've not heard of it, then again, another excuse to get you to subscribe.
05:06And we had a question from someone asking about whether the current dry weather is an indication of how summer might be.
05:13And so I looked back at the last time we'd recorded this amount of rainfall up to this point.
05:19Funnily enough, it was back...
05:22I need another graph here.
05:24So we're going... Again, we're looking at 2025 here.
05:27But I looked back at the last time we had about 300 millimetres up to the 1st of April.
05:33And it was 2012.
05:35Almost exactly the same amount of rainfall up to the start of April.
05:39Again, a very dry March that year.
05:42But what followed was the third wettest summer on record.
05:46So that doesn't bode well.
05:48However, 2003 is another year where we had almost exactly the same amount of rainfall up to the 1st of April.
05:55And then what followed was one of the hottest summers on record.
05:59So third wettest, hottest summer on record.
06:02Both had similar first three months.
06:05What can we assess from that?
06:07Well, very little, I suspect, because they're both so different.
06:11So I would suggest that the weather that we've experienced up to this point has very little bearing on what the summer might be like.
06:21Having said that, I've noticed something else that's quite interesting.
06:24Digging back in the stats, something that I've been thinking about for a while.
06:28We went through that very wet period of weather from the middle of 2023 up until more towards the end of last year.
06:37And this series of maps here shows five seasons in a row, starting with spring 2023, where the UK as a whole had wetter than average seasons.
06:48So spring 2023, wetter than average for the UK as a whole.
06:52Not for everywhere. Northwest and West Scotland, drier than average.
06:55But yeah, a lot of rainfall there for southern and southeastern parts.
06:58Then the UK had a wetter than average summer in 2023.
07:02Again, not for everyone, but the UK as a whole, wetter than average season.
07:06Autumn 2023, a very wet autumn, particularly for central and eastern parts of the UK.
07:12Eastern Scotland, East Midlands, East Anglia.
07:15Then winter 2024, another wetter than average season across the UK.
07:20Most places wetter than average and most places wetter than average last spring, except for Western Scotland.
07:26A very wet season. And that was the fifth season in a row for the UK as a whole that it was wetter than average.
07:33But then we had a drier than average summer.
07:38Again, not for everyone. There was some regional variation.
07:41Western Scotland, Northwest England, Northern Ireland had higher than average rainfall in many places.
07:46But the Browns balanced out the Blues and we saw overall a slightly drier than average summer.
07:55Then we had a drier than average autumn. Again, not for everyone.
07:58It was very wet across the Midlands and southern England, but for the UK as a whole.
08:01And then a drier than average winter. The winter just gone.
08:05Now we just had a drier than average March.
08:07So what we've seen, we've seen five wetter than average seasons for the UK, followed by three drier than average seasons.
08:16What that means for the rest of spring and into summer.
08:20Well, we'll have to wait and see. But it is interesting.
08:24I thought it might correlate with your own sense of what's going on.
08:30We had this very wet period in which it seemed like low pressure, low pressure, low pressure kept on turning up.
08:36And now we seem to have lost so many frequent low pressures.
08:39We seem to be seeing more high pressure in charge of the UK.
08:43And certainly you can make out the high pressure on this.
08:48I'm just going to fast forward to the end.
08:51This is the time recording the satellite image, the visible picture across the northern hemisphere.
08:57And you can see where the high pressure is.
08:59You can basically make out where the jet stream is on here.
09:02This big loop across the Azores there, the Azores and this trough here.
09:08And then you can probably follow the jet stream north again over the top of the UK, leaving this very large gap across northern Europe.
09:17Cloud free skies. And that is what we're seeing at the moment.
09:21So in terms of the bigger picture, let's take a look at that.
09:24That's the jet stream at the time of recording this.
09:28There's that big loop, the big L, low pressure trough there.
09:33Lots of fronts moving into Iberia once again.
09:37It's been exceptionally wet across Iberia during the spring so far.
09:42It will continue to be unsettled over the next few days.
09:46Less so, I think, compared with a lot of the weather they saw through March, but still further rain and showers.
09:51It's also been very unsettled across Greece and Turkey.
09:55Lots of thunderstorms still ongoing there.
09:58Less wet compared with the start of the week, well, the weekend.
10:03There's also a lot of showers across Italy.
10:05So this is where the unsettled weather is ending up.
10:07And you can see this interesting jet stream loop.
10:12We've got the big ridge over the UK leaving high pressure just to the east, sitting over Denmark, over Norway.
10:19And we've got our winds coming from the southeast.
10:23And meantime, we've got these troughs, these dips in the jet stream either side of it,
10:28where you've got the low pressure systems ending up the Azores into Iberia into parts of southeastern Mediterranean.
10:35Now, fast forwarding that into Wednesday, what you can see is actually these two troughs start to come together.
10:44And at the same time, if I play this forward, this area of low pressure is edging further north.
10:50High pressure is also edging a bit further northeast.
10:53Now, what that will do, and if I pause it there, this is the start of Thursday.
11:00And you'll see these arrows here.
11:02That just indicates that there's some activity of the jet stream swirling around over the top of southwest England.
11:09So it all gets very loopy, not untypical in the spring, of course,
11:14because in the spring, we've got less of a temperature contrast from the pole to the subtropics.
11:19And that lends itself to a weaker, more loopy jet stream.
11:23However, it's a right dog's dinner by the time we get to Thursday.
11:27We've got this area of low pressure, this trough, merging with this trough to the west,
11:33and the high pressure moving north and eventually becoming cut off.
11:39This area of circulation in the jet stream is likely, on Thursday,
11:46to allow some of these weather fronts to sneak into southwest England.
11:50So Thursday, a marked change for southwest England, south Wales as well potentially,
11:56then a few other spots later on Thursday into Friday because of this little circulation,
12:02this upper area of low pressure that's going to start to allow some showers to move in.
12:07The rest of the UK will continue to be affected by high pressure, but the high pressure is drifting north.
12:13So it's over the Faroes by this stage, and we've got this east to southeasterly wind,
12:18so a lot of fine weather on Thursday, but because of this circulation to the southwest,
12:23we're going to see some showers.
12:25Now, the high pressure continues to move north, and the whole thing,
12:32play that forward, the whole thing disrupts.
12:36So that cuts off a circulation, an anti-cyclonic circulation.
12:41You can see it there.
12:43And so it becomes cut off from the main flow as the main flow dives to the south of Europe
12:50and continues to bring areas of low pressure in.
12:53As that happens into the weekend, we basically see an anti-cyclonic easterly wind,
12:59and eventually through the weekend, what we'll also find is that temperatures will start to come down,
13:06having peaked on Friday.
13:09So the warmth that's coming in from the east and southeast on Friday starts to reduce.
13:15You'll see this cold air coming in, and that starts to cool things off through the weekend and into the start of next week.
13:23But by this point, higher pressure is sinking south again into the North Sea.
13:27So we end up where we start, essentially, that position.
13:31That's Wednesday. That's Sunday.
13:34So after all that craziness with the jet stream reorientating itself,
13:39we end up essentially in the same position with the jet stream then again looping over to the top of the UK.
13:49Let's put a bit more detail on that.
13:51Now, I mentioned the showers in the southwest on Thursday.
13:55But before we get there, obviously the rest of Tuesday is just sunny skies,
13:59just some patchy medium cloud across Northern Ireland.
14:02I saw that on the satellite image.
14:04Western Scotland as well, some patchy medium cloud.
14:06Otherwise, for most of the UK, it's sunny skies, temperatures doing well.
14:12Warmer spots towards the northwest. More on that in a moment.
14:15Fast forward to Wednesday. Very little change, really.
14:19Wednesday, it starts off with some patchy cloud over the Pennines, perhaps.
14:23Northeast England, eastern Scotland, patchy low cloud here and there.
14:26That disappears by the afternoon.
14:28This isn't broken. It's just showing no weather across the UK.
14:31But we've got these wind arrows.
14:33So it's going to be a brisk breeze on Wednesday across many southern and eastern parts.
14:37That's going to limit temperatures 11, 12 Celsius, 12, 13 along the east and south coast.
14:43The highest temperatures likely towards the northwest of the UK, given the wind direction.
14:47Into Thursday, here comes that showery rain.
14:51Now, if I take that off, we can look at it in a bit more detail.
14:55Rewind the clock.
14:58And that comes in.
15:00During Thursday morning, 10 a.m., there is showery rain pushing into the southwest of England.
15:05From the word go, a lot more cloud.
15:08Now, these showers, they're going to be hit and miss.
15:11They're going to be coming and going, perhaps merging to give longer spells of rain.
15:14Initially, mostly just Devon, Cornwall into Somerset, Dorset.
15:18But then some of these showers appearing into south Wales, Ireland by the afternoon.
15:24And so, yeah, a very different feel.
15:27There we are at 3 o'clock.
15:29More extensive showers across south Wales, southwest England, Bristol, Cardiff, southwestwards essentially.
15:35Rest of the UK, cloud-free skies after some patchy low cloud in the east at first.
15:40This brisk easterly wind, again, making it feel cool along the coast.
15:45So, 11 Celsius there on the east coast, 15 in Norfolk.
15:51But higher temperatures towards the northwest, 16s, 17s.
15:56The highest temperatures likely towards the west and northwest, away from this area of cloud and rain.
16:05And we're talking about 21 Celsius in the warmest spot.
16:1120% chance of a 22 Celsius.
16:13But lower temperatures because of the brisk breeze and the showery rain in the southwest.
16:18Now, by Friday, that rain is moving north.
16:21A few spots of rain possible as it pushes into Northern Ireland.
16:25The rest of Wales by the afternoon.
16:27But it soon disappears because higher pressure is building once again.
16:32One fly in the ointment on Friday.
16:34Slight change in wind direction, more of an east-northeasterly.
16:37And look at the temperatures on the coast by this stage.
16:4010, 12 Celsius.
16:42Could be even lower, 7 Celsius there, just on the coast of eastern Scotland.
16:49And the warmest place likely to be somewhere around Cardiff and Bristol.
16:5422 Celsius, possibility a little higher.
16:58But Friday's the peak in the temperatures.
17:01Which you can see here, the oranges get more orangey.
17:06Up to Friday.
17:07And in fact, compared with average, here we are.
17:11This shows the maximum temperature compared with average.
17:14So it's much as Scotland, west Wales, northwest England on Tuesday and Wednesday.
17:20So this is showing where it's 3 degrees above average.
17:243 to 6 degrees above average.
17:26The key is here, by the way.
17:283 to 6 degrees above average.
17:309 are these darker reds.
17:32And, yeah, there's a possibility of that, I think, in one or two spots.
17:35Western Scotland, for example, northwest England.
17:38But much more extensive reds by Friday there across many parts of the UK.
17:46Now into Saturday.
17:48Let's show you that.
17:49Saturday, the warmer-than-average conditions more restricted to parts of Wales and the south-west.
17:56Western Scotland cooler than average along the North Sea coast.
18:00And what's interesting going into the weekend is, whilst for most it's essentially more sunny skies,
18:08in the east we get more of this easterly wind, lower temperatures gradually.
18:16So on Saturday, for example, 7 to 10 degrees there in the east.
18:20Still mid to high teens across some western parts and southwestern parts of the UK.
18:26Those temperatures are gradually coming down.
18:28And there's an increased chance of some of this low cloud affecting the east of Scotland and northeast England by this stage.
18:34High pressure is sitting in the North Sea.
18:37So, yeah, basically it's sunny and warm over the next few days.
18:41But a few exceptions.
18:43Southwest England, south Wales, showery rain on Thursday because of that upper area of low pressure moving in.
18:49That then disappears for Friday.
18:51And it's southwest England, southwest Wales with the highest temperatures on Friday as the sunshine returns.
18:56But increasingly, easterly breezes will bring cooler weather through the weekend and into the start of next week.
19:02Temperatures seriously held back on the east coast through the weekend and into the start of next week.
19:08And some patchy low cloud around as well and some mistiness.
19:12So, yeah, don't expect heaps of warm sunshine if you're on the North Sea coast.
19:16It's going to be a very different story there compared with, say, western and southwestern parts of the UK.
19:23But will it last? That's the big question.
19:27And I'll just show you the chart, the probability chart here that shows the most likely weather patterns.
19:35A summary of several hundred weather model runs.
19:40And the signal is clear.
19:42The reds and oranges indicate where high pressure is dominating the weather across the UK.
19:47The forecast here goes out to the 14th of April.
19:51And what it clearly shows for the next two weeks, give or take a few days, it's reds and oranges.
19:58Two main flavours of reds and oranges coming through for the start of next week.
20:03This one, Scandinavian high, this lighter orange.
20:06And then this darker red, high pressure to the north.
20:08That's basically just subtle variations in the position of the high pressure.
20:12So we go to Monday's forecast there.
20:16It's 50-50, whether the high pressure is sitting over Scandinavia and giving us this east to southeast of the airflow.
20:24Or whether it's this darker red and we've got higher pressure a little bit shifted more over the Faroes, over Iceland, giving us more of an east to northeast of the airflow.
20:33Not much difference between these types of high pressure.
20:36Of course, because of the easterly influence, it will continue to be cool on the North Sea coast.
20:40We'll see some patchy low cloud again.
20:42But for most of the UK, it will simply be settled with that high pressure lasting throughout next week, whether it's to the northeast or to the north of the UK.
20:51However, then from the 11th and 12th of April, there's been this consistent signal for these blues to return.
20:59That indicates low pressure near the UK, a bit more of a changeable flavour of weather.
21:07Do we believe it?
21:08Could it turn things more unsettled for the rest of April?
21:12How confident we are that's going to happen?
21:14Well, to understand what's going on here, we need to take a look back.
21:18I promise this isn't about blowing my own trumpet.
21:21But we need to go back at 19th of March.
21:26This is the 10-day trend from 13 days ago.
21:29And this was my forecast for the first week of April, April week one.
21:35And this shows the output from the Met Office Ensemble model.
21:39And it shows higher than average pressure to the north of the UK and lower than average over Iberia.
21:45And I thought this was interesting because it was such a confident signal from the computer modelling for two weeks or three weeks time.
21:53And it has ended up being correct.
21:58Doesn't always happen.
21:59So this isn't, like I said, about blowing my own trumpet.
22:02This was, you know, highlighted to me by one of our deputy chiefs, one of our experts in the Met Office Operations Centre.
22:11And it's based on the Met Office weather model output.
22:14So this is the result of many people's work in the Met Office.
22:17But I just thought it was interesting that it had this strong signal and the signal turned out to be correct.
22:24Why was it so strong and why did it end up being correct?
22:27Well, that's because of this.
22:30Now, you might have heard we talked about it before.
22:33It's the sudden stratospheric warming that we saw at the start of March.
22:40I think it was the 11th of March we saw this sudden stratospheric warming.
22:43Now, I'm not going to go into the details about what sudden stratospheric warming means because there's a video that explains this on our YouTube channel.
22:51So do search for that on YouTube.
22:53Met Office sudden stratospheric warming.
22:54You should find all the details.
22:56But to quickly summarise, during the winter, the stratosphere above the North Pole cools down significantly.
23:05It goes, wow, minus 60, minus 70 degrees, something like that.
23:10Really cold air above the North Pole in the stratosphere.
23:14And because of that very cold air that forms every winter, you get this strong circulation called the stratospheric polar vortex,
23:21which circulates many miles above the sea level.
23:25And that circulation can act as a tailwind for our own jet stream.
23:31So when that circulation is strong, then it can cause a powerful jet stream and we get more unsettled weather in the UK.
23:38Sometimes through the winter, though, that circulation can become disrupted and can even reverse.
23:44And when that happens, we get a sudden stratospheric warming.
23:46That's where the very cold air in the stratosphere above the North Pole suddenly warms out because you get this disruption in the wind circulation.
23:53It might reverse and that reversal of winds, if it does happen, then it acts as a headwind for the jet stream.
24:00It's not the only factor that affects the jet stream, but it is an important one.
24:05And if we get these sudden stratospheric warmings in the winter, then there's a lag of two or three weeks.
24:12But you can end up finding a weaker jet stream and an increased chance of easterly winds.
24:17Now, we had that sudden stratospheric warming on the 11th of March.
24:21In fact, it was, as it turned out, the final warming of the stratospheric polar vortex or the stratosphere above the North Pole, which happens in the spring.
24:34Every spring, there's a final warming where that stratospheric polar vortex doesn't reform.
24:39So this was a remarkably early final warming.
24:43And what we're seeing now are the effects of it play out in the troposphere.
24:49That's where our weather takes place. And this shows that quite nicely.
24:53Now, what this shows is the wind direction at various levels in the atmosphere going from the sea level upwards.
25:01This 10 hectobascals here, that's about the height that we typically talk about the stratospheric polar vortex.
25:08And this goes back to the end of March. And what you see here, these blues, the blues indicate where the wind is reversed.
25:17So it's going east to west rather than west to east.
25:21The blues are where it's going in the opposite direction to what we'd normally see with our jet stream.
25:26So you've got these blues. And what you'll notice is that the blue colours start to descend downwards through the atmosphere.
25:35In fact, they descend downwards. And this is the current time of recording this.
25:42And we've got the blues at the surface. So we've got the easterly winds at the surface.
25:46But we've still got this effect that continues to dominate the weather throughout much of April and into May.
25:54One exception, these, I don't know what colour that is. I'm colourblind. I should have checked.
26:00Not blue colours, let's call it that. That's where the wind is actually back to westerlies.
26:05And we don't really know why there's this period around the middle of April where it goes a bit more westerly for a bit.
26:12So you've got to return to some area of low pressure or low pressure influence, rain, showers and so on.
26:18But it's relatively brief. So the blues that I showed on that probability plot don't last that long before we're back to the...
26:28And here's the confusing bit. There's blues on the probability plot that refer to low pressure.
26:32The blues on this chart refer to easterly winds. So apologies for that. I didn't cover the colour scheme for this one.
26:39But the blues here indicate back to more of an easterly influence or at least high pressure near the UK from the middle of April.
26:49Or at least for the third, fourth week of April into the start of May.
26:54And that looks like an after effect of that wind reversal in the stratospheric polar vortex.
27:02So what I'm getting at here is we had that sudden stratospheric warming on the 11th of April.
27:07It's already having impacts on our weather at the surface. There's more of an easterly influence, high pressure near the UK.
27:13It will continue to have an influence throughout the second half of April and into May.
27:19How does that look with the computer models?
27:23This is week two of April. This is next week, basically.
27:28First week of Easter holidays for many kids. Not for all kids in the UK, but for many kids.
27:32And this shows the output, the pressure anomaly output, from the Met Office model on the left and the European model on the right.
27:41And both are showing a strong signal for high pressure over the UK.
27:46It released over Scotland with an easterly airflow, low pressure over the Azores.
27:51They're both agreeing strongly that high pressure will be dominating throughout next week.
27:56We've already been through that. Then take a look at April week three.
28:00And this is the period when there's a bit more uncertainty.
28:04And those blues start to appear on the probability plot indicating low pressure close to the UK.
28:09And indeed, the Met Office model has got blue colours there indicating slightly higher chance of low pressure near the UK.
28:17So for many kids, this might be the second week of the Easter holidays.
28:22And then the European model doesn't really have any colours, mixed signals or at least weak signals or average weather.
28:29But here's the interesting thing. The following week, last week of April, going into, well, this is the 21st to the 27th of April, I should say.
28:38The high pressure returns, that high pressure anomaly over Scandinavia in the Met Office model, directly over the UK in the European model.
28:47Is there another chart? Yes. First week of May. High pressure signals still there and relatively strong at this range.
28:57So to summarise that, essentially, we've got high pressure dominating the weather for the next week or so.
29:04One or two exceptions. Showers in the southwest on Thursday, some low cloud and much cooler weather in the east through the weekend and into the start of next week.
29:13But essentially, that high pressure is lasting until the middle of April.
29:16Then there's this signal for the weather to turn a bit more changeable, but only for a few days by the looks of it.
29:23Because of the long lasting effects of that stratospheric polar vortex disruption and various other things.
29:31One of them, just typical spring like weather where the jet stream is weak.
29:35And that could mean that the changeable spell around the middle of the month is short lived and high pressure returns shortly after.
29:46We'll see. But it's interesting to talk about it anyway, I thought.
29:52Anyway, that's all for me. Thank you very much for joining me for this week's Deep Dive.
29:56I hope you enjoyed it and we'll keep you updated as always on our YouTube channel. Bye bye.