To be fair, I didn't notice a lot going on when I was a modeller, but then I sort of followed Andy Crisp's approach; "there's no point in looking at the weather because when you get to the contest its the same for everybody", though I did notice slowly increasing temperatures in France and progressively wetter summers in the UK over the period from the early '70s until around 2003.
However, gliding is rather more weather-dependant because if the weather isn't good enough to stay up for several hours and isn't likely to be soarable over a fairly area you don't even think about attempting that
300km cross-country task. As a result I now take a lot more interest in forecasts and actuals than I ever did when I flew models competitively and, since I now log all glider flights along with notes about them, its easy to check back and see what I did and when. As I said previously there is now a lack of the steady cold Northerlies with bright sun on the ground that we used to get in the mid-April to mid-May period during the noughties. These were excellent for long flights up the east coast. Thats also when the jetstream used to come south as far the UK in winter and be well north of us in summer. Now its over the UK in summer and way down over Spain and the south of France in winter. Right now the forecasts show the jet stream crossing France and extending down across the Mediterranean into Libya before swinging back north across Egypt.FWIW, all global climate models from the earliest useful ones to the present have consistently predicted that the mid -lattitudes, i.e. us, would get wetter and we're certainly seeing that now.
2003 was way warmer than any summer I remember In France through the '80s and '90s. For a good graphical representation of what the global climate has done over the last 20,000 years, look at this:Indeed, but the Northern jety stream didn't used to go nearly as far south over Europe as it is at present.