Saturday 14th February
The fog on Friday was very slow to clear after thickening around 08.30. There was a noticeable improvement after 11.00 and by 12.00 visibility was good. The afternoon was dry and warm before sporadic rain arrived just after 17.30. A peak temperature of 8.9C was logged at 14.23, after which time the thermometer began to drop quickly, almost 2C in one hour. There was a slow decline during the early hours, down to 1.6C at 06.00 and an air frost set in at 07.01 on Saturday when the thermometer dropped to -0.1C, the minimum of -0.3C was logged at 07.42, before the thermometer edged back to 0.2C at 07.43.
After first light on Saturday blue sky could be seen that allowed further warmth to escape into the atmosphere and the temperature to drop further. The barometric pressure, as forecast, began to rise mid-afternoon on Friday producing the transitory ridge of high-pressure that will result in a sunny day on Saturday, with the pressure still rising rapidly at 08.00. The thermometer returned back above freezing with 0C logged at 08.27.
As the ridge eases eastwards the wind will back from northeast to north this morning and west this evening. This will see the pressure fall back as another area of low pressure arrives that will return us to cloud and rain on Sunday. Sadly, the sunshine will become weak and then blocked out in the late afternoon as cloud arrives from the west.
Although we will return to more unsettled weather from Sunday the difference will be that there is no high pressure to the east of the UK blocking the depressions arriving from the Atlantic, thus they will cross the country and not hang around dropping large quantities of rain.
There was significant wind chill last evening when at 20.30 the thermometer read 3.2C but wind chill, when it was very breezy with a maximum gust of 23mph, meant outside it felt more like 0.6C. Wind chill measures the rate of heat loss from exposed skin. A higher wind speed combined with low temperatures causes faster heat loss.