xmetman
I know it’s not quite the end of July [2016], but I thought I would produce anomaly charts for mean sea level pressure [MSLP] so far this month, and see what influence the atmospheric circulation may have had on rainfall in parts of the south and east England. Quite a simple anomaly chart in truth, up to the 24th of the month there was a belt of lower than average pressure over the central Atlantic (-4 hPa) and higher than average pressure over Greenland (+7 hPa) and central Europe (+3 hPa). The British Isles is sandwiched between the two, with the zero anomaly running WSW-ENE across northern England with higher than average pressure to the south and lower than average to the north. The belt of anomalous low pressure in the central Atlantic ties in nicely with the lower than average sea surface temperatures [SST] in the central Atlantic. This kind of flow would have produced rather cloudy weather in the north albeit rather warm and muggy at times, the closeness of the high pressure ridge over central France would also would explain the low rainfall totals in the south. This might be a slightly better explanation than the “random distribution of showers” that Matt Taylor proffered on twitter as the reason, but I’ll leave it to you to be the final arbiter on that.
(I am not altogether clear of how images that you upload to your posts are stored, but the good thing about these images is that they link back to the article in my Wordpress blog so don't eat up my Google allocation wherever that may be).
