Wednesday 24th September
Although there was less full sunshine on Wednesday the wind from the northeast being a little less strong allowed the temperature to recover just a little with a maximum of 15.7C, almost a degree up on Tuesday, however, this high was still 3.4C below average. The past night was very different from the two previous nights as variable cloud began drift across around 21.00, that minimised the loss of warmth into the atmosphere, which resulted in a minimum of 7.8C at 02.57 when thicker cloud then arrived stabilising the temperature around 8C. The low was just 0.9C below average, quite a contrast to the ground frost that developed during the previous early morning.
Wednesday revealed a cloudy sky after dawn that at times was so low that it obscured the high ground but by 08.00 this was beginning to thin allowing weak sunshine to break through. Variable cloud will limit sunshine during the day as the breeze is picking up moisture from the North Sea as the high pressure slowly relocates towards Scandinavia, a subtle change in direction.
The anticyclone will continue to dominate our weather until Friday, even as it eases further over Scandinavia leaving a ridge of high pressure over the UK that will block any advance of weather fronts arriving from the Atlantic. Low pressure systems will be present in the eastern Atlantic but make no further movement toward the UK until the weekend. We should still be able to enjoy the dry, fine weather with sunny intervals, even if my garden would like some rain after a week with little rainfall. The air stream will continue from a northeasterly quadrant that will become lighter allowing temperatures by day and night to recover closer to the average for September.
The track of Hurricane Gabrielle is now becoming clear, which will see it head towards the Iberian peninsula by the weekend. At the moment it does not seem if it will have any great impact on the UK weather.
Throughout Westonbirt Arboretum each specimen is labelled, either on the trunk or low-hanging branch. Blue labels indicate Westonbirt’s “champion trees”, the tallest or largest of their kind in Britain.