Why has the weather been so depressingly grey lately?

If you feel like it has been a while since seeing sunshine, you’re not alone.

Some parts of England have recorded no sunshine at all during the first week fo November.

Odiham, a village of only a few thousand in Hampshire, has had just 12 minutes over the past 11 days to go out and get a tan.

The bad news is that this weather is expected to continue early next week.

For those of you flying out from London Heathrow to sunnier destinations, it is a similar story – the airport has only seen two hours of sun this month.

In the south of England, the sun has shined for only an hour.

To make matters worse, southeast England and western Scotland experienced low-average sunshine in October too, along with much of England and Wales in September.

Across the whole of the UK, the country has experienced just 5% of its average sunshine for a typical November so far.

In contrast, Scotland and the north have experienced the most pleasant sunshine.

For example, Kinross, in Scotland, recorded 20.7 hours of sunshine between November 1 and November 7.

Why is it so cloudy?

Behind this darkness is the rather ominously named ‘anticyclonic gloom’.

‘This can occur when high pressure traps a layer of moisture near to the earth’s surface, bringing a prolonged period of dull and cloudy weather, with mist and fog also possible,’ the Met Office said.

High-pressure systems make the skies clearer and the wind gentler. In the summer, they bring fine and warm weather.

Winter, however, is a different story. High pressure leads to cold, dry days with slow wind speeds and sometimes things get so bad, it forms an anticyclonic gloom.

These multiday periods of little wind and sunlight are called Dunkelflaute, which roughly means ‘dark lull’ or ‘dark doldrums’ in German.

There are usually up to 10 anticyclonic glooms a year. Most take place between October and February in northern Europe.

All this stuck moisture is whipped about by an anticyclone – a swarm of high pressure – and forms low cloud, mist and fog.

With the sun so weak in the autumn and winter months, this blob of frost and cloud re-thickens itself again and again as the temperatures drop, moisture condenses and even more clouds form.

Anticyclonic glooms are especially gloomy for renewable-energy engineers. With next to no sun or wind, green power generation has tumbled in the UK over the last few days.

Met Office spokesperson Stephen Dixon said these conditions are ‘unusual but not unheard of’.

The gloom is set to continue though a frontal system moved south yesterday and will start to clear the cloud and bring plenty of sunshine for Monday.

But cloud amounts will increase again by Wednesday, with a greater chance of some rain, especially in the north.

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