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Dare i watch the GFS 06Z "But...but...but the SSW will be different this time guys!" There's no other way around it- SSW = Sudden Spring Wrecker. We don't get a Spring if we get an SSW. The earliest we can expect ANY kind of settled sunny weather would be late May now but it's still a roll of the dice depending on all this crap northern blocking nonsense so we may just get the dullest year ever, time will tell!

A lot of cloud but bright spells; slight rain shower 0500=0.2mm of rain; lowest temperature =2.3 C in the early hours

richie3846 Heathrow's adjusted values don't represent every station though so you have to be careful. Heathrow & Charlwood are underestimating sunshine figures by quite a bit but other locations such as Manston, Brize Norton etc probably only underestimate by a tiny fraction. The easiest way to figure how much of a deficit at certain stations, for me at least (and even that isn't 100% accurate) is to check values on the ensoleillement map on Meteociel when there has been wall to wall sunshine, particularly in Summer months & you can see which places are worse than others for sunshine reporting. Herstmonceux is by far the worst reporter as they only record something silly, like 11.6 hours of sun on a perfectly clear day, while Heathrow & Charlwood would get about 14.2, Shoeburyness 14.7 max & places like Manston, Brize Norton 15.1. It's way more complicated & very annoying that stations don't adjust themselves! I try to keep it as fair as I can in my sunshine tables by not adjusting the ones that only need miniscule adjustments & then adjusting a bit less than necessary, other stations like Heathrow & Charlwood & it seems to more or less work out about right- but still not 100% accurate of course!

....And there is it the classical HP over Greenland that spreads northwards up to the arctic, another completely useless spring month coming?

danm I've saved a screenshot shot of B87's calculation table for future reference. Very useful. I'm thinking a lot of the ongoing discussions about sunshine over the years, may have been unintentionally misleading and pessimistic because of this discrepancy. I'd say this topic needs bringing to the forefront from time to time, to remind people of the adjustments, and to check their sources of information for raw or adjusted data, where that is possible.

Andy Bown Yep, here it is on my way back, looking your way.

113.6 hours sunshine at Brize Norton, my nearest met office site. I'm assuming the weatheronline.co.uk figures are raw data. If so that'll be around 124 hours of adjusted figures. With 6 days left, it seems likely that we'll end up being only slightly below average, quite a turnaround from the opening week. The middle two weeks were quite sunny, more than average, so overall the month has felt quite reasonable here. So 365 hours this year so far. It appears we've not been as cloudy locally compared with some other areas. Thanks to B87 for providing the adjustment table. I'll use that from now on, I've saved a screenshot for future reference. Worth mentioning that when we're looking at sunshine folks, it may be useful to find out, or try and work out if the data source is raw or adjusted. I'm getting a vibe that sometimes people are looking at the raw data, and therefore believing it's cloudier than it is compared to average. I worked out that weatheronline.co.uk uses raw data, because their numbers don't match the met office climate summaries.

What I’m finding more astonishing than how poor and cold our weather is, is that there’s not a single day on the 00Z where temperatures anywhere in the UK at any given time are above 18C… and that goes out till the 10th of May, 3 weeks from the start of meteorological summer.

sunny_vale My optimism for the year was extinguished once we got another late season SSW. Those things are the deathknell for Spring & guarantee endless gloom. To think people were saying, "oh it won't be that bad this time!" or "we could be on the good side of the SSW!" well guys, it was even worse than last years SSW lol. Hope this isn't gonna be an every year thing now otherwise Spring is a thing of the past! I'm normally fairly optimistic & I was back in January but yeah, this is the worst period of weather I've ever lived through, can't lie!

55.0 hrs of sunshine here in the first 24 days of April, 56% of average. It's still possible it could be the dullest April on record ( since 2000) as April 2000 recorded 75.5 hrs and currently holds the record.

jtay yes it’s the opposite of the last few days. Can see cloud on the W/NW horizon which will probably be here soon after 9.

If only it was ..... On this occasion its a warm easterly ..

B87 looks like a big problem is even the months with surplus sun also had surplus rainfall, and the big 2 (July and August) were both low on sun and high on rain. There’s been no real respite even in the supposedly better months we had. And yeah this year is somehow worse so far because we haven’t even had February to help (completely misplaced dry month anyway)! I’m usually such an optimist so seeing that backs up my currently opposing sentiments hahaha

B87 Vegas and Albuquerque have a lot of altitude though to help, Vegas is nearly 800metres, Albuquerque just over a mile up.

TwisterGirl81 in May 2020 Bournemouth had 353 of sun.

*Stormforce~beka* Agreed. Woke up to a lovely morning too, but looking at the satellite, it won't last then that's it for the next few days. Pathetic really.

A bit of rain recently 0.4 mm from another little feature that WRF picked up well.

Yes, ground slightly damp. Temp down to 1.8°C in the night. Currently 3.3°C .

25th April , windscreens frozen over again! 4th/5th time last fortnight more than feb

2.9c raining ️ so much for dry until Sunday oh well… how are we still in this rut? picked up a bug in Londonford mixed with hay Fever lovely jubbly At least managed a good walk yesterday, lots of gardening and odd jobs sorted.. including stopping crows nesting in loft through broken vent cover… by crawling in loft space and blocking vent to 5cm

Heard the rain on the dormer roof when I got up this morning and although it looks to have passed through now, it’s left everything damp so nowhere near as good a start to yesterday and Tuesday. doesn’t look like a bad day coming up though, maybe a few showers but compared to the conditions we’ve endured for much of this spring, passable. just need the warmer air to push up ahead of Saturdays system and for that to remain to our south, then we may manage to get a half decent few days.

Cloudy cold and dry Temp 2.6C , low 2.1C, Barometer 1005mb falling rapidly, Rainfall mil, Wind F2 SSW

Interesting small cyclonic system in the Atlantic which has been given 10% to obtain tropical characteristics over the next few days After decaying this systems moisture will become part of a Rossby Wave Break Event during this weekend into early next week. Looks like this system spawned from a CCKW from South America With influence of CCKW activities and the MJO itself mentioned in the above post, there will be a significant - possibly major snow event across the Himalayas as a mix of troughing and cut off lows converge by April 28th. Overall a significantly snowy setup for Russia and Asia with accompanying cold > significantly cold temperature anomalies which will extend into parts of the Middle East. This once again coinciding with a move into a negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation. This CCKW and MJO activity will also keep significant rainfall and significant flash flood risk events ongoing across East and Southeast China, Taiwan and Japan through at least May week 1.

11.7 and 89mm

They really should release the actual figures. The raw numbers that are displayed on their own website plus others like meteociel and weather online are wrong and misleading. Still don’t understand why they don’t, considering they show the actual ranges on the anomaly maps.