David Bowker reflects on how support from the RMetS Legacies Fund enabled him to attend and present his research at the RMetS Annual Weather and Climate Conference.

Through the grant made from the legacies fund, I was able to attend the Weather and Climate Conference at Exeter University from 08 to 10 July and present my paper on ‘Changes in the Nature of Arctic Maritime Air’ (presented in the morning session for the Climate group on Thursday 09 July). The grant covered travel and accommodation expenses, as well as the conference fees. The paper, primarily focussing on northerlies in the spring quarter, seemed to be very well received and will form the basis for future research and an article which is currently being prepared for Weather. Lauren Burton from the UK Met Office has expressed an interest in being involved in this project, as she is currently working on large-scale weather regimes in the north Atlantic (she ran a poster session on this work during the conference). There were subsequent discussions with her and with others at the conference about the content of my paper.

The broad conclusions so far are that it is still reasonable to expect incursions of Arctic air in spring, but there is evidence that in the most recent decade (2015- 2025), these incursions are becoming more limited in their spatial and temporal extent, as well as their capacity to deliver widespread snowfalls to lower ground. There have been fewer significant snowfall events, such as those of April 1978 or April 1981. Instead, spells of pronounced warmth in spring seem to be having a more pronounced geographical spread and greater longevity. This makes sense in terms of the UK Met Office’s trends for spring temperatures, though it is important to remember that cold air in spring can come from other sources such as the North Sea, when persistent haar on eastern coasts limits temperatures there. Attention was drawn in the paper to the even stronger corroborative evidence of work done by Rantanen, Lee and Aalto (Atmospheric Science Letters 2023; 24: e 1178) which looks at how the overall increase in temperatures in Arctic regions is manifested in large-scale weather types or regimes; those regimes associated with negative NAO have been shown to exhibit a much more rapid rate of warming than those with positive NAO.

At the end of the presentation, the point was made that Arctic northerlies are not necessarily becoming ‘tamer’ at all seasons of the year at a uniform rate. In particular, intrusions of Arctic air in late autumn and early winter can become highly unstable at the lower layers owing to enhanced maritime convection over relatively warm seas. This can lead to heavy snowfalls in exposed coastal areas, and reference was made to relevant recent events in December 2023, November 2025 and January 2026.

This therefore is a weather regime to be watched closely in forthcoming years, and I am very grateful to the Royal Meteorological Society for the opportunity to present this research and the generous grant from the legacies fund.

Find out more about the RMetS Legacies Fund