The United Kingdom could go as many as ten consecutive days without rain, after an end to October dominated by back-to-back storms.
The Environment Agency said England had experienced its wettest week in two years, following Storms Austen and Boelo, the first named storms of the season, together with another area of low pressure on Monday. Boelo was particularly notable for the sheer volume of rain it brought.
High pressure now returns, BBC Weather's lead weather presenter Stav Danaos reported, bringing a prolonged spell of largely dry and calm conditions with very little rain in sight.
Mist and fog will be a persistent feature, with some dense patches slow to clear in the mornings, potentially causing reduced visibility and travel disruption. Once the fog lifts, brighter spells should develop, although low cloud may linger in places.
For Halloween on Saturday evening, most of the country should stay dry, with clear skies as darkness falls and light winds, although a few spells of rain could reach the Western Isles of Scotland. Temperatures are expected to edge lower over the coming days, with a cooler feel at night and in the early mornings.
The high pressure is expected to sit over or close to the UK for at least ten days. A change could begin around mid-November, when Atlantic low-pressure systems may approach again, bringing wetter and windier weather, with most areas probably seeing average or even above-average rainfall.
The intensifying El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean has been linked to wetter and stormier weather in the UK during late autumn and early winter.
There is a vocabulary question here that the forecast raises and does not settle. The week of storms was described as unsettled. The ten days of nothing are described as settled, and calm.
Read plainly, British weather is at its most settled when there is none of it. The condition is defined entirely by absence: no rain, light winds, little movement, nothing in sight. The word for weather happening is unsettled. The word for weather not happening is settled.
The mechanism is named with the same candour. A blocking area of high pressure will dominate the country into November. It dominates by preventing. Its achievement, over ten days, will be that nothing arrives, and the forecast records this as holding sway.
Our analysts have identified one exception, and it is a careful one. The single feature expected during the settled period is fog, which is weather that cannot be seen through, arriving in the stretch when there is nothing to see.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that the fog is also the only element forecast to cause disruption. For the next ten days the United Kingdom will be inconvenienced exclusively by the absence of anything happening, made visible.
Relief should arrive in mid-November. The low-pressure systems will return, the rainfall will be average or above, and the country will once again be unsettled, which is to say that it will have weather.