Its nearly half way though May, and yet snow is still falling on the hills! Previous years the snow would have been long gone and we’d be basking in the sunshine, but something has changed…and its not global warming!

This winter was pretty extraordinary in terms of snow and deep cold, but now what’s going to happen with the uk weather this summer? Will it be hot? Will it be wet? What are the met office saying? Well they are saying nothing now, concentrating on the more immediate forecasts rather than seasonal.
Its time I made my predictions, there’s no real science behind it, I just look at nature, see what clues it provides and try draw a conclusion from that.
Thanks to the, previous increased ice cover in the arctic and antarctic and the eruption of this volcano in iceland I predict that this summer will not be a record breaking hot summer 2010.
There was a forecaster in the paper who said the same, one of his clues was the height at which the birds have nested in the trees, a lot lower than normal, which is supposed to mean that the summer is not going to be brilliant.
Another old wives tale is:
Ash before oak, in for a soak, oak before ash, in for a splash.
Refereing to the times that the leaves bloom on the trees. (I’ll update this section when they do)
Spring is pretty late this year, although the odd swallow has been spotted 4days earlier than normal in the north of arran.
There are, however, forces which may make my prediction of a non recordbreaking summer in the uk wrong. There is an el nino happening in the pacific which tends to drive our weather to the more extreme. Another factor is the Sun. After an unusually long time without any sun spots it looks like the sun is wakening up with more sun spots and who knows what solar cycle 25 will have in store in the future! Its pretty obvious to me if the sun starts outputing more energy the earth will absorb this and heat up, it won’t happen instantly though.
The volcanic eruption in iceland has been pretty big, I’m sure it will have some affect on the climate this year, volcanos tend to have a cooling affect on the earth. This is due to the sulphur dioxide and dust particles which are thrown high up into the atmosphere blocking out some of the Sun’s rays.