Article published in Farmers Guardian, Friday 25th April 2025

Some welcome rain over the Easter weekend, although still not enough to account for the deficit of rainfall since March. Many areas of the country, except part for Wales and southwest England have received only a third of the expected rainfall in April. For some these totals are even lower, although further rainfall this week will have added a little to the totals.

This is in sharp contrast to April 2024 when some areas received over 200% of the usual rainfall with Scotland being especially wet.

Recurring high pressure remains responsible for the low rainfall totals, and there is more evidence of the high wanting to be building back north of Scotland this week. There are some hints, notably from the ECMWF ensemble model of high pressure becoming more widespread again early i May. However, this is not a universally followed principle and many models argue for lower pressure.

The longer range charts into the middle stages of May are suggesting that conditions may turn more mixed of unsettled. Of course, the problem then becomes that if we get a change of weather pattern do we start to rapidly make up for the drier conditions?

This has happened in previous years with 2012 being one of these; after the dry March came a cool and wet April followed by a mixed May. Overall spring 2012 ended up near average overall, but then that led to one of the wettest summers on record.

At weatherweb.net I have been discussing the similarities with previous years, and there are many of them. If the high pressure does build into early May we would likely escape the ‘wet spring’ headline. But I am thinking about whether this dry weather could have an undue influence on the European Monsoon which tends to occur in June and whether it may be stronger, i.e. wetter as a result?