By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

Persistent wet, foggy, rainy weather of the last week will come to an end early in the coming week. A more positive trend is around the corner, according to Benjamin Sipprell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton.

The bad weather that seems to be hovering over the Vineyard this month is related neither to El Niño nor LaNiña, nor is it connected to global warming. Mr. Sipprell said the atypical scenario is explainable; it is about weather. To put it simply, the gray, often foggy dampness of the past 10 days, with more than two inches of rainfall, is a traffic jam between a large weather system over the Atlantic Ocean and the movement of a series of smaller New England-bound low pressure systems trying to move east.

The huge high pressure system, larger than the United States, sits out in the Atlantic. Its boundaries extend from Greenland to the north, to west of Spain to the south, to the tropics. “It covers the entire central Atlantic. It throws up a roadblock, so now you have low pressure systems that can’t move east,” Mr. Sipprell said.

The high is preventing low pressure systems that are forming and moving across the United States from going anywhere to the east of us. “We had one large low pressure system move in from the west last week. It couldn’t go any further to the east. So it retrograded back to the west.”

While some communities in the middle of the country have suffered large rainfall and subsequent flooding, that is not happening here. Rainfall so far this month is two inches, not so significant. The average for May is just over four inches, according to the weather data collected by the National Weather Service cooperative station in Edgartown.

Rainfall so far this year is slightly below the average, even though April was wetter than normal. So far the total rainfall this year is 17.02 inches. The average precipitation for the first five months of the year is 19.20 inches.

But it isn’t rain that has caused consternation among those who love to be outdoors; it is the shortage of sunshine. There were many days in the past two months when it was overcast. April was wetter than normal. The total rainfall was 6.09 inches, 1.81 inches above normal for the month. The precipitation followed a drier than normal March.

The storms that have passed over the Vineyard in recent weeks have been fairly tame. Mr. Sipprell offers a lesson in storm watching: “Every low pressure system matures and then dies. It is a cycle.” The storms that have approached New England have arrived fairly mature. But as they slow down and become stationary, Mr. Sipprell said, “They die. They will fall back on themselves.”

Looking ahead to next week, Mr. Sipprell said, “Things get progressive beyond the weekend. There is a frontal system approaching that could come Tuesday and Wednesday and push the weather east.

“I’ve seen these patterns before. Sometimes we have a cool spring,” he said. “It is not that out of the ordinary. But it is atypical.”