xmetman
"Very wet in northern area; warmer and thundery in the south" that's how the monthly weather report from the Met Office summed up July 1985. The reason that I mention this is that I've had a look at the objective Lamb Weather Types [LWT] that I download from the Climate Research Unit [CRU] at the University of East Anglia. I then ran a very simple compare routine to find the best match from LWT for the period 31st of May to the 27th of June for 2016 in all previous years back to 1871. And top of the list came 1985, whether this has any significance in what the weather for the next month in the UK will be like I'll leave you to judge - at the end of July! All I can say is that there are a remarkable number of high place analogs for June 2016 so far, a month that was anticyclonic until the 9th, and then became more and more progressive and occasionally cyclonic as the month went on. I'll freely admit I did run this same analysis (but looking at 7 days rather than 28) at the beginning of the month and found that 2009 (the barbecue summer), was almost a perfect analog for the first week of June 2016. In this latest analysis, 2009 is a 73.4% match for 2016, whilst 1985 is a 90.2% match, again I will stress the analysis is very simple and a little bit of fun. When you publish a blog you must have the courage of your convictions and on the strength of the summer so far, often cyclonic and thundery, and looking at the latest T+192 of the GFS, I might be off to a bit of a flyer!
