These days headlines have started appearing in the British press about the danger of drought in the country. It reminds us of the situation when exactly a month ago we lived in our country. A three-week atmospheric dipole momentarily changed the meteorological reality in Western Europe. A powerful anticyclone has settled in the latitudes of the British Isles and for the time being it does not want to move any further. It is this that favors rain and storm conditions in Spain, because in contrast, cold air in the middle and upper layers of the atmosphere has repeatedly established unstable conditions in southern Europe and northern Africa. This is a dipole. High pressures are located at unusually high latitudes, and low pressures dominate us. When the opposite is normal: an Atlantic storm is spinning over Britain and there is an anticyclone and atmospheric stability. A week of anticyclone triggers a drought warning in the United Kingdom. Let’s not say three weeks as it has already been entered into this odd spring of 2023. And the models for the coming weeks are indicating that this pattern of atmospheric circulation will be maintained at least through the first half of June. These rains have been spectacular, recorded since mid-May in Spain. They may not solve the drought conditions that exist in many regions, but they do allow the threat of water restrictions in agricultural and urban environments to go away for weeks. They are irrigating the fields, moistening the soil and reducing evaporation. Due to their localized character and their intensity, they hardly contribute to water storage in reservoirs. But if this had not happened, we would now be talking about the application of more severe water restriction measures in the irrigation of large areas of the Mediterranean coast, in addition to the measures already implemented in Catalonia and Andalusia. So the current dry conditions in the UK are in our favour. They allow the origin of unstable conditions. This is what the atmospheric dipole pattern has established in the synoptic view of the North Atlantic in recent weeks. And he, for the time being, doesn’t want to move.
(TagstoTranslate)drought
