Winter warmth returns as stormy weather sweeps Scotland

Scotland will experience a spell of windy weather as a storm system tracks across Iceland on Tuesday.

This will bring gales to most of the country and severe gales to the more exposed parts of the north west.

Winds are likely to gust 60-70mph across the Western Isles.

While gusts elsewhere won’t be as strong, there’s expected to be what we call mountain waves developing across eastern parts of the country.

This is basically where the strong winds meet a range of hills or mountains and the air becomes very turbulent on passing over it.

This means areas downwind can experience strong gusts as the wind descends back to the ground in turbulent eddies.

Given the direction, these lee wave gusts are most likely around Aberdeenshire, the Lothians and Borders. Gusts from this direction can be notorious for causing issues for high sided vehicles on roads running north-south in the east of the country.

One road which could be particularly bad is the A1, where two lorries overturned on December 10 from a similar weather event.

This system will also bring some warm air which has originated from the Caribbean.

Temperatures could possibly reach high of 16C in parts of Moray and Aberdeenshire due to something called a foehn wind off the Cairngorms.

This is a wind which arrives laden with moist air and rain, but dries out after crossing a mountain range and warms rapidly upon descent on the leeward side.

This can sometimes leave areas on either side of a mountain range with huge differences in temperature.

This is the second time in just over a week where temperatures have hit exceptional values for the time of year.

On December 28 the temperature briefly hit 18.7C in the north Highlands, the highest temperature ever recorded in UK during the month.

The winds will ease from central Scotland on Wednesday morning, but will take most of the day to ease back from the north of the country.

Temperatures will take a drop on Wednesday too with snow falling on the hills in the far north. More wet and windy weather will return on Saturday.