UK weather is set to get much windier, wetter and warmer when February gets underway - thanks to the difference in sea temperature on the other side of the world.
The Met Office is predicting that the cold snap that has seen freezing nights and frosty mornings over the West Country for a couple of weeks now will end, because of the ‘La Niña’ weather conditions currently in the Pacific Ocean.
The La Niña - which is the opposite conditions to El Niño - has been in place in the Pacific for the past couple of years, but climate experts in Australia and south east Asia say that’s changing, with an expectation that El Niño will return soon, bringing a return to scorching dry conditions in Australia.
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But El Niño is not returning yet, and the La Niña conditions are still affecting the weather in this country. Met Office forecaster Aidan McGivern said what this will mean thousands of miles away in the UK is that there will be a wet and windy end to winter - starting from next week.
La Niña conditions usually mean a cold first half the winter, with an unsettled end. And that’s what’s been happening so far, with a high pressure over the southern half of the UK bringing clear skies, plummeting night time temperatures, and cold, frosty but relatively dry weather for much of January.
“One thing that the computer models are picking up on for the start of February is for that higher pressure influence to slightly wane further south, and that would lead to some of this more changeable weather further in the north to extend further in the south as well,” said Mr McGivern in a forecast posted on the Met Office's YouTube page this week. “There’s a reason why that looks fairly likely for the start of February and it’s to do with the El Niño southern oscillation.
“This is an oscillation in sea surface temperatures across the Pacific. At the moment we’re in an uncertain phase of that oscillation, which varies year to year. We’re in this phase where you get colder air and sea surface temperatures off the Chile coast, and then warmer air and sea surface temperatures off the coast of Indonesia. That’s called La Niña, and there is a correlation between the La Niña conditions in the Pacific and what we see in the UK is a colder start to winter and a milder, more unsettled end to winter,” he added.
There has been much speculation about the likelihood of what’s called a ‘sudden stratospheric warming’ of the polar vortex, which could create conditions like in 2018, when the vortex around the North Pole reversed, bringing Siberian weather to the UK known as the 'Beast of the East'.
But Mr McGivern said that seemed unlikely this year. The computer models do show the polar vortex - which is currently strong - weakening, but it won't weaken enough to actually reverse and send a freezing sting in the tail for the late winter of 2023. “So if that (La Niña) was the only factor controlling our weather, then we would expect conditions for the second half of winter to become more unsettled - wind and rain, but also milder across the UK as well.
“And with the computer models picking up on that for the start of February, that does indeed look fairly likely that the start of February will be fairly unsettled, bouts of wind and rain and a return to milder air in the UK,” he added.
"To summarise, we're expecting conditions to turn more unsettled as February begins, wetter, windier but also relatively mild across the UK...this sudden stratospheric warming, we're not expecting to reverse the winds, we're expecting the winds to ease a little bit into the start of February, but any kind of implications on the UK's weather wouldn't be expected until mid to late February if they occur at all, and that's a big question mark."
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