Our colder summers and Greenland

Last year we had a cold and wet summer, relatively speaking, in fact for the months May to July total max temperatures have been falling year on year as shown in the chart below:

Now as we have discussed before one reason for last years colder weather was the jet stream that stalled see:  Is this the summer of our futures?

And a possible reason for the jest stream stalling was a high pressure that parked itself over Greenland.

The above maps are from ClimateWatch Magazine's article - Summer weighing heavily on Greenland Ice Sheet, which explains:

'The map on the left shows the difference from average pressure at the 700 millibar pressure level from May-July 2012 compared to the 1981-2010 average. Gold colors indicate higher-than-average pressure. A large dome of high pressure camped over Greenland and the Northwest Atlantic this summer. The influence on temperatures (map on right) was dramatic. Temperature anomalies at the same altitude were as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average over Greenland....

[And]...Research published earlier this year found that since the late 1950s, the 6 warmest summers and 5 of the 6 largest melt years in Greenland have occurred since 2000. A similar “dome” of persistent high pressure was common to each of the episodes, but it is probably not the sole cause of the unusual warmth and melting.'

The weather and the jet stream.

Figure 1

The winter weather to date has been rather warm, if wet and windy. A major reason behind this has been the jet stream, which for most of December has been above us, bringing warmer air in from the Atlantic. A good explanation as to how the jet stream affects UK weather can be found in the netweather.tv - tutorial

You can see a predicted model of the jets stream from the Global Forecasting System at Weatheronline.

Figure 1 above shows the jet stream as predicted for new years eve at 18:00 hours GMT.  As you can see the jet stream is moving in a general South to North direction as it passes the UK, which will bring warmer weather as can be seen in figure 2 below:

Figure 2

Therefore for Ynys Môn weather on new years eve is likely to cloudy but mostly dry with a mild temperature (up to 11 Celsius) but may feel colder in a brisk wind (25-30 mph). An approaching cold front from Ireland may bring rain sometime after 9 pm,  with  light rain showers for most of new years day.

Base data from Weatheronline and Met Office for Surface Pressure Charts