Is summer finally on the way?

At long last the weather seems to be settling down.

Meteorological summer starts on 1 June, high pressure is taking control, and that means lots of dry weather and some warm sunshine for most of us.

But any reports or talk of a heatwave are, well, just hot air at least for now and here's why…

You'd be forgiven for thinking things have taken their time to warm up this year.

While overall temperatures have been around average this spring, there's been a real lack of very warm days. England and Wales had to wait longer for the thermometer to climb above 19C than in any year since 1986.

Even in May temperatures have only crept up slowly with 23.4C the highest recorded so far, in Cardiff on 22 May. In most previous years we'd been above 25C by now.

However it is possible - but by no means certain - that we might just reach that figure before the month is over.

The Azores High - a semi-permanent area of high pressure centred in the Atlantic - is having a big influence on our weather and should bring us a lengthy dry spell over the next week or so.

There will be sunshine, but not constantly. Areas of cloud will drift across the sky from time to time. And while daytime temperatures will be several degrees above the seasonal norm, we're not looking at anything extreme or exceptional.

That's largely because of the wind direction - to get any really hot weather we'd need a southerly or south-easterly wind, pumping air northwards from southern Europe or Africa.

But in this case our airflow will tend to originate from the west or the north, which will limit the rise in temperature. So we're likely to peak at 23 or 24C on Sunday or Monday.

We'll almost definitely have hot weather at some point! You may see stories forecasting heatwaves but it's always worth pausing to check the detail.

Sometimes the predictions are based on extreme computer model runs that are looking weeks into the future at conditions which will often change.

And don't forget, just because it's warm doesn't mean it's technically a heatwave. The official definition is quite strict. Temperatures have to meet or exceed a certain level for three consecutive days and this threshold varies depending on where you are.

The Met Office raised the temperature thresholds for eight counties by one degree Celsius last year because climate change is pushing what we see as "normal" upwards.

Last summer the UK set a new record high temperature - 40.3C in Lincolnshire - something which scientists say would have been "basically impossible" without global warming.

What's the risk it'll get that hot again this year? It's extremely unlikely. Scientists estimate that - in our current climate - the hottest parts of the country would only expect the temperature to reach those record levels about once every 1000 years. So if it were to happen again in 2023 that would be very worrying indeed.

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