I just came back from long summer holidays in Poland (thus little activity on the forum) but it wasn't all that summery, besides a few heatwaves.
In July I went sailing to Mazuria country (northeast Poland) for nearly two weeks.
And everything seemed to be plain wrong with the weather:
1. The gusty winds, about 7-8 Beaufort scale. It isn't unusual as the storm comes or for a day or two, but they were persistent for a week and a half, not stopping for a minute, nearly unchanged in direction (north-to southeast) Day-and night, literally, not a break.
These are autumn open sea conditions!
2. The cloud cover, very dynamically morphing "woolly" formations, quite low and dark, fast moving on many attitudes. And sometimes randomly appearing lenticular clouds - normally ascribed to very high attitudes over 10-12thousand feet mountains
3. The temperatures during the windy period oscillated around 14-17 degrees in the daytime and down to 9 at night, this doesn't happen in July, unless new quality is recognized.
During all this windy time the air was crystal clear, the visibility seemed to really stop at earth's curve.
July is supposed to be the warmest month of summer in central Europe, it was so in the most of the country, but the northeast weather was an effect of some massive arctic front that got 'derailed' from Scandinavia. I sailed with others who have been doing it nearly every year there for over 20 years, and none of them has seen this kind of weather unchanging for so long, a day, two, three and the would normally die down at dusk, this time it did not.
The strangest part I found about this aura was that not a single sailing weather forecast on the radio seemed to predict this situation, and so it went on for the whole time!
They spoke about winds up to 5, 18-22 degrees Celsius, mild cloud cover and thunderstorms at the end of the day.
But the days went on as described above, and what I found quite interesting was that as the day passed the clouds in fact seemed like they 'want' to form the Cumulonimbus 'towers' but as they shoot up, it seemed to hit a ceiling of cold air and behaved like thick smoke in a room, spilling around to look like some kind of star trek ships.
My take on it would be that there are some kind of changes in the atmosphere going on that make normal prediction systems fail. Say the pressure, humidity and temperatures would indicate a storm, so the meteorologists forecast storms, but it seems like something else enters the equation and is not accounted for, making all their predictions just a bad guess!
With the type of climate in Poland, the predictions fail often, but repeated failing to forecast something that doesn't go away or change 24/7 for a week and a half is mind boggling at the least.
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And recently, after coming back to Dublin, the wind has shown its best, causing weather warnings all over the country. That's nothing unusual as winter approaches, but the high attitude jes stream winds have doubled their usual speed for a day or two, rising from 100-115 mph, to about 200mph and this manifested amazingly in the sky.