High pressure yields to a more unsettled late May, with Bank Holiday changes likely. We'll review spring's sunshine and also cast an eye over the broader European weather patterns in the coming week.
High pressure continues to rule the weather at present, and will continue to do so until this coming Thursday or Friday. However, the medium range forecast models are increasingly agreed that the dry, settled weather will finally break down in time for the Bank Holiday weekend - rather like it did for Easter - completing a generally dry sunny spring but with wetter weather coinciding with the Bank Holiday weekends. It might seem that it always happens this way, but it doesn’t always, e.g. in May 2018 the sunniest and warmest weather coincided with the two Bank Holidays.
The unsettled weather has potential to provide relief for areas that are struggling with water shortages and very dry ground, but there are no guarantees: particularly in the south and east of England, changeable westerly types like the one that is forecast for the back end of May do not always bring substantial rainfall.
High pressure is currently situated over north-western Britain, bringing plenty of sunshine to the vast majority of Scotland and Ireland, plus west Wales and parts of north-west and south-west England, but a north-easterly flow has brought plenty of stratocumulus in off the North Sea to cover a large part of England.
This pattern looks set to continue during the coming week, with the west and especially north-west of Britain maintaining a lot of warm sunshine, while the east of England in particular will be prone to cloud coming in off the North Sea. It probably won’t be continuously cloudy - the cloud will tend to come and go, and it will often retreat to near the east coast of England during the daytime, but for eastern England in particular it won’t be as sunny as most of the other high pressure spells that we’ve seen so far this spring.
This means that for the spring as a whole, sunshine anomalies across the UK may well show a limited regional bias, since it was eastern England that was particularly sunny during March, while north-western Britain was relatively cloudy, but in May it is proving to be the other way round. It is currently looking “touch and go” as to whether Spring 2025 surpasses the famous “lockdown spring” of 2020 as the UK’s sunniest spring on record - much hinges on how much cloud we get off the North Sea, and on whether the more unsettled weather starting during the Bank Holiday weekend turns out predominantly cloudy, or predominantly bright and showery. Spring 2020 currently stands as the sunniest spring on record for the UK as a whole by a large margin, beating the previous record of 1948 by over 70 hours. With 2025 looking comparable, it is highly likely that even if the second half of May turns out relatively cloudy for most, spring 2025 will end up ranking comfortably as the second sunniest spring on record, in Met Office series going back to 1911.
It is unlikely to be the driest spring on record for the UK as a whole, but it has a chance of being the driest in some areas of the country, such as the Met Office’s England E and NE region, which covers the area from Northumberland down to Lincolnshire. This is very dependent on how wet the last week of May turns out to be.
Perhaps surprisingly, it is not just a large area of England that is under a lot of cloud at present: despite high pressure being nearby, much of central Europe is under a lot of cloud, as is northern and eastern France, but most of Spain and Portugal and the southern half of France are currently clear and sunny. A persistent northerly airflow will bring relatively cool, and at times cloudy, weather for a large part of continental Europe during the coming week, and some of the warmest and sunniest weather in Europe will tend to be found in Ireland and in the western half of Scotland. Unusual heat has often been a theme of recent Aprils and Mays in Europe, but it looks unlikely that any substantial heat will spread into southern Europe during the coming week.
There are signs on the medium range forecast models that towards the end of May we might get a substantial heatwave developing over Spain and Portugal, as the weather patterns will have changed by then, with Britain often under a westerly airflow and high pressure building over southern Europe, potentially pulling some hot air into Spain and Portugal from north Africa.
This is a long way off and subject to change, but worth keeping a watch over as we get closer to the time. It is probable that southern and central Europe will warm up to some extent starting in about a week’s time as we lose the high pressure over north-western Britain and the northerly flow over central Europe, but it will probably not become unusually warm.
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