Malaga Weather Blog

Anyone looking at the forecast issued at the end of last week would have been forgiven for thinking that the weather this week would be bad. Actually, the majority of the forecast computer models were going for a poor week, although the solutions were never unanimous. On Friday the odds were 70/30 for a wet week and by Saturday they had changed to 60/40. Everything hinged on how trough disruption would take place over the eastern Atlantic during Sunday. Trough disruption is a notoriously difficult problem for computer models because the atmosphere becomes finely balanced for a series of results.Imagine one of those sausage-shaped balloons that you have at Christmas. Imagine again that a wall in the house represents an area of high pressure that will not yield. The trough, represented by the balloon is squeezed from behind by another area of high pressure. Imagine using your hands as this second area of high pressure. As you press the balloon, assuming you don’t burst it, the air has to go somewhere, and that’s usually the place of least resistance. By pressing your hands in certain positions on the balloon you can sometimes be surprised when most of the air goes to the top, rather than the bottom, of the balloon. This is exactl;y what happened during Sunday. Most of the air went to the top of the balloon with only a small portion going to the bottom of the balloon. The result, in weather terms was that most of the activity was squeezed north to the west of Scotland and only a small amount of the trough disruption slid south into Iberia. Okay, we had some rain, but the continuing bad weather failed to materialize.