More Showers, Then Indian Summer, Then Cold Blast?

There's a lot to talk about this morning, we have low pressure anchored over Ireland bringing more heavy, thundery showers, some improvement into the weekend, a sniff of an Indian summer early next week, followed by the chance of the first meaningful cold blast from the north later..

Starting with today, and the low pressure over Ireland will just slowly nudge northeast during the day, with showers spiralling around it. These will be heaviest, thundery and most frequent in western and northern regions, with a particular focus on Ireland itself and later on northwest England and the western half of Scotland. Further east the showers will be fewer and further between but still potentially heavy at times.

Into Friday those sharp showers continue - especially in the north and west, but as the low pressure gradually weakens and heads northeast through Scotland the showers will tend to fade from the southwest. At the same time though we'll see more showery outbreaks of rain moving up into the southeast quarter of the country, some of which is likely to be on the heavy side before eventually moving away during the early hours of Saturday.

Into the weekend and there is some uncertainty but Saturday is looking likely to be mainly dry for the bulk of the UK with just a scattering of showers and temperatures fairly close to normal for the time of the year. After a chilly start Sunday is likely to see some rain pushing up from the south, but it will introduce some warmer air behind it.

That leads nicely to the start of next week and although confidence isn't high at all at this point, Monday is looking likely to be dry for many (not all though) and for England and Wales at least highs of 17-22c are possible, so in the Indian Summer category.

That warmer air may well hang about for a time, but being gradually squeezed south and from midweek onward we may need to look north for the first proper blast of Arctic air of the season..

Don't forget that Michael Fish will be online later today with his weekly forecast with all the latest details for the weekend and into next week.

Published on 18th October 2012 09:50 Updated: 18th October 2012 09:50