Low pressure areas with high surface pressure (and vice versa)

hatrickpatrick

Was wondering if someone could explain something to me:
Sometimes, we get areas of low pressure with relatively high surface pressures, and anticyclones with low enough surface pressure. For instance, although there's a low pressure system just offshore of the country at the moment, its surface pressure is around 1010 or 1015, which is fairly high. And, while it's quite cloudy and overcast, it's not all that wet or cold, certainly not as bad as had previously been anticipated.

With that in mind, can someone explain the correlation between upper level pressure and surface pressure and how they relate to the weather? It seems to me that sometimes you can have large depressions which would suggest fairly mucky weather, but their surface pressure is high enough to keep the weather reasonable tame and mild. How does this work? Which type of pressure is more important to look at when forecasting (if you take Meteociel as an example since it's the most popular site on this board, upper level pressure is indicated using colour codes, while surface pressure is indicated using numbers embedded in isobars).

Which has more effect over the weather? Am I correct in saying that one can still get relatively good weather during a depression if the surface pressure is high enough, and that a high pressure area with low surface pressure can still be mixed?

whitebriar

You can have very fine weather in a depression if you avoid the bands of precipitation circulating around it.
That's always the way.
Of course chaos theory determines where that happens or if it does because obviously if your depression moves from warm waters up over colder regions it is going to explode deepen and have more precip,in which case avoiding the precip is less likely.