With all the headlines and rumours now talking of drought, you'd start to wonder how is July 2018 going to turn out? What do the long range outlooks say?
The UK Met Office have stated in their Contingency Planners for July-September that above average temperatures and below average precipitation are far more likely for the period in question. This can be shown by its GloSea5 model too which shows high pressure being dominant across much of northern Europe with lower heights to the south of Europe.
NOAA's CFSv2 model has been confident of an anticyclonic July for quite a while now since the beginning of May with a large area of high pressure bang over top of the British Isles. It still shows this solution to the present day. The exact distribution of the pressure is strikingly similar to that of July 1955 (see 500mb height anomaly reanalysis from NOAA below) which to this day remains Ireland and Wales' sunniest month on record.
The SST anomaly for 28 June 2018 is similar in ways to that of NOAA's reanalysis for July 1976. The end of June 1976 brought a very similar heatwave to Ireland (though on a much larger scale then to the UK) which continued on into July. May 2018 and May 1976's SST anomaly charts were very similar to each other and at the moment, it looks like this continues even into July of both years with their similarities.
When I made my Summer 2018 forecast, my analogue for July 2018 pointed at a very anticyclonic month with high pressure right over the UK. Therefore, with this and all the above outlooks or guidance from models and SSTs, there is no reason to not assume that it will be an anticyclonic July with further very dry and possibly hot weather.
The shorter range models, with especially the GFS in particular, have been struggling with the beginning of July recently. The GFS has been infamous in bringing the westerlies back as it usually does (like more than 95% of the time). The model very rarely shows persistent patterns without a change at some point in its runs though you can't totally blame it because our climate is changeable after all a lot of the time. It continues to struggle but there are a couple runs which show a very intense area of high pressure to build back over the British Isles again after some hit and miss showers for the first few days of the month.
July 2018 is looking like another classic of a Summer month with perhaps the first 18.0c+ Central England Temperature (CET) month since July 2013 and the second such month of the 2010s decade. #Summer #2018 #continues
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