It's that time of year when tropical storms become more frequent and meteorologists around the world are closely watching typhoon Noru, which was expected to impact western Japan on Sunday 6 August.
Some of the weather models are predicting a tropical storm or hurricane to develop in the Gulf of Mexico commencing this week. You can keep up to date with developments at the US Hurricane Centre website.
Closer to home we have been looking at the weather prospects for the month of August. However, confidence isn't high in forecasting European weather at the moment. The storms, far away in the tropics, can impact our weather too, by sending "waves" into the upper atmosphere which can then impact the positions of the jet streams and where the high and low pressure systems will settle.
We believe it is most likely that low pressure will dominate our weather during August. To start with, the low pressure will be near Scotland and covering Scandinavia, then during the month the low pressure will be more frequent near Iceland. As a result, we can expect mostly unsettled weather for NW Europe, including the UK and Ireland. So overall, a cooler, wetter and windier month than average is predicted. Most of the time, winds will come in from the nearby Atlantic Ocean, bringing spells of rain and showers interspersed with settled spells of weather. The region of high pressure will spend most of the time over central Europe, but just occasionally it will influence the weather over southern Britain bringing brief interludes of hotter, sunnier weather, but at the moment it doesn't look like they will become widespread or long lasting.
The expected average positions of the high and low pressure systems for the 5 days from 14 August, by this time, is near Iceland and the high pressure ridges in from the Azores to France, central and southern Europe, with an Atlantic flow (westerly winds) across northern Europe.
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