Low-pressure weather systems have been stalling across the UK and Western Europe in general, leading to days of rain and cloudy skies.<\/p>\n
It has been caused by a large area of high pressure being stuck across Scandinavia and acting like a road-block preventing weather systems from moving eastward as we’d normally see.<\/p>\n
This is a “blocked” weather pattern and, while fairly common, it has been notable because of its consequences on the UK so far this year.<\/p>\n
Blocked weather patterns can take on slightly different forms depending on where exactly large areas of high pressure can become stuck.<\/p>\n
For example, if the blocked area of high pressure happens to be situated over the UK, it stops rain-bearing weather systems from arriving and gives us a prolonged dry spell.<\/p>\n
In the summer, it can lead to droughts but also heatwaves as hot air is drawn in from the south-east.<\/p>\n
Over the winter, it can make our weather dry, sunny and cold.<\/p>\n
However, very small changes in position can make the difference. <\/p>\n
If the blocking high was just to the north of the UK in winter, it allows very cold air from north-east Europe to arrive, resulting in similar conditions to the infamous “Beast from the East” in 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Low-pressure weather systems have been stalling across the UK and Western Europe in general, leading to days of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-417569","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}