The past few weeks have given us relatively little sunshine. We are currently experiencing changeable and cloudy weather in large parts of the country. What’s next?
At the weekend there is a strong high over the Baltic Sea and a low over northern Italy. The low will ensure heavy rain in some places in Italy, which should usually be welcome given the drought there. Local storms are also to be expected. In northern Europe, on the other hand, the sun will often shine undisturbed by the high pressure area. Germany lies between these weather zones, which results in a clear gradient between the north and the south.
Our figure shows the hours of sunshine on Saturday (left) and Sunday (right). On both days of the weekend it will remain dry in the north German lowlands in the sphere of influence of the high over the Baltic Sea. The sun shines there widely for 10 or more hours a day. There will be a few patches of cloud, which is why the expected duration of sunshine is slightly below the possible 16 hours in mid-May. With every kilometer south there will be more clouds of low over Italy at the weekend. There will be showers or thunderstorms in the middle and in the south on both days. You can expect them especially in the afternoon, but they don’t hit everyone. The probability of getting a shower is about 50 percent on both days. In the mountains it is slightly higher. In the course of Sunday, rain will most likely come from the south in the foothills of the Alps. The probability of getting wet there is correspondingly higher than 50 percent. The unstable weather, especially in the south, is reflected in the duration of sunshine. In a strip through the middle, which includes Hesse, Thuringia and Saxony, the sun will shine for 6 to 8 hours on both Saturday and Sunday. That is half of what would be possible without clouds, i.e. from a purely astronomical point of view. South of a Karlsruhe-Nuremberg line, the clouds are clearly in the majority, where the sun usually only shines for 2 to 4 hours.
In the coming week it will probably continue to be unstable with many clouds and cool temperatures throughout the country, so that even the recently dry north-east of Germany will get rain. On the one hand, the low over northern Italy will shift to us, on the other hand, a new low will probably affect our weather patterns from the north-west.