Leaderboard

As winter begins to wain we must remind outselves 'peak' cold availability from the N/NE/E is still on tap for another 3-4 weeks- so although the suns height does temper any daytime low maxima - we are still in the game. Im drawn to the nice sight of the PV stretched south into Scandi around day 9 & this should continue to be out focus if we believe 18/19 can squeeze another cold spell - 06z was close but no cigar....

I hope not......that would be 16th June

Depends on what you are seeking from a cold spell. Chances of powdery snow, ice days, many days of lying snow is becoming increasingly unlikely, although remains possible to early March. However a snow event which may slowly thaw the next day is possible for the next 6 weeks. After such a dreadful winter I would be happy with the latter.

Was it though? Clearly this winter has shown that just one variable i.e SSW isn't the sole reason for a cold spell in the UK. The bitter E,ly last winter would of been caused by other variables being favourable. I shall repeat what I said at the beginning of this winter and have said for several years now. The reason why we cannot forecast using Teleconnections is because we do not fully understand them and more importantly how they interact with each other. You then have the added complication of the UK being a tiny Island. Obviously this doesn't mean members should give up trying. However if members want a more stress free model viewing next winter then they should take background signals with a pinch of salt until this promise appears at +144. I started this winter with a new approach of only viewing to +144 with a glancing look at the ECM to +240. However I admit the temptation of looking at GFS +384 was too much when promising charts failed to appear within the reliable timeframe.

Yes, as I said a couple of weeks ago (and still hold the belief), we are ascending into an early spring. I fear this could be a drought year in all honesty, we've seen pretty much the same pattern dominate our weather for the best part of a year now- namely a repeated nosing in of the Azores HP which is sometimes getting to our E and pumping up warm S'lys and SW'lys. Not sure what changes the foundations over the next few months to take us more profoundly towards a -AO/-NAO regime. Mid latitude HP is ruling the roost our side of the hemisphere. The upshot being, little rainfall and increasingly hot temperatures could be on the menu over the next few months.

If I find out who it is that's taken all our cigars this winter I'll give them a piece of my mind, and trust me, it wont be pleasant!

Summer Sun is one of the most consistent posters in the model thread, his posts nearly always contain charts and useful information. Summer sun will still be making contributions in the model thread when most of us have packed in for the summer, the idea that he cant mention warm temperatures is laughable. At some point the title of the forum will change to something about spring......will every poster mentioning cold charts be told to go somewhere else then?

Chance of an isolated 15c later in the week subject to cloud cover it's certainly unlikely we'll see daily records go but maybe an outside chance on Saturday

No change on my musings from last night ....ec46 week 3 at 10pm will be watched for the scandi sausage and undercut

I guess most have given up, not me.

But the point is that some posters seem to arrogantly assume, once they have pushed the boundaries of this limitation that their forecast of, say, pressure distribution in the Atlantic and western Europe brooks no argument. The clue often is when a post starts, or includes, statements such as "the models are not picking up the signals" which patently assumes that the posters knows with certainty what the correct signals are Of course pushing the boundaries is fine and anyone doing so should be applauder but a little humility and a little less dogmatic assumption wouldn't go amiss.

@ciel fantastic picture! @bigsnow might explode with rage as that is a pic from the big fall of snow England got. Had a browse through the GFS, ECM, UKMO charts this morning - absolutely dismal for us. Obviously always a chance of snow for the Highlands but anywhere else below 200 meters...it is currently looking bleak for the rest of this month. Some mild and sunny days to come though so can’t really complain - better than pishing rain! (There will be some of that about as well though. ) Hopefully in two weeks time we start to see something wintry in a reliable timeframe. This time last year I was up the Arrochar Alps! See you all in two weeks!

Doubt it, there would be tumbleweed blowing through it...

Remember its already 11c in the SW...under 850hpa temperatures of 0c roughly. By Friday we are upto 6-8c widely. So no reason why we can't add at LEAST 3-4c at the surface based on that...Then you have Fohn effect and your getting mighty close to daily records. I don't think we will get there, though Saturday is possible, but I think your badly underdoing the potential here. Expect thlose highs to nudge up further as we head towards Friday. PS - high resolution GFS has 14c for N.Wales on Friday. As I said, maxes typically underdone in this set-up, so probably add 1-2c again. Probably will get a local 17c based on that 06z GFS.

At least GFSP keeps a sense of humour amidst all the mild onslaught. BTW it looks like the Beast wants to come back for his birthday! LOL!

A settled 10-days ahead looking at the average pressure slightly lower in Scotland but no washout by any means. Mild as a result widely across Europe.

I've certainly given up for Winter. Maybe a cold Spring but Winter is assuredly over for cold and snow.

This will do the trick, removed from car and chucked back in the garage for another season today!

Headed over to Dufftown this morning via Cabrach and winter definitely still in play up there, everything looking lovely in its winter coat. Glad to have winter tyres on, still some hard packed snow in places on the road. Temperature there hovering just below 0c but up to a balmy 5c in Dufftown itself. Light winds and sunny skies making for another lovely winters day.

Interestingly the SST this week have moved in direction towards anomaly that resembles Atlantic Tripole a bit more, this along with a possible MJO phase 8 could contribute to -NAO towards the end of Feb. we will see

A new thread with an appropriate title will start in due course as we move into Spring. But "heat hunt" might be a bit too optimistic for a while longer!

Yes, Focused model discussion thread.

Not a lot of support for it either (yellow and black line)

I would love to be able to say..w o w there's a big freeze on the way but sadly I can't..instead here are some nice mild spring-like charts from the Ecm 12z to puke over!!..cheers ecm..knew you would let me down!

Hunting for snow and cold? Hawaii Haleakala National Park Summit District is closed today not due to lava but snow! https://www.theinertia.com/news/mauis-haleakala-national-park-summit-district-closed-due-to-snow/ My hunt in Leicester continues...

Surely if we keep pushing it back, we can get ready for the start of winter 19/20!

7.7C still expecting blocking to become a bigger influence as we go through the next few weeks especially with the MJO looking like heading through phase 7 into phase 8 have seen quite a few ensembles with a block in that sort of position the ideal scenario would be to get the core of the above average heights nearer Greenland and get a better NE / E flow but I will be happy just to see a block appear in the nearer term charts especially in this "unique" winter where blocking that should have been appearing has not for whatever reasons I am also unsure why this has been the case this winter but I am certainly not throwing in my towel yet, lets wait and see how this progresses - remember the timings last year...

Bit like a cold hunt in winter. Bit optimistic C.S

Well, at least the background signals are still looking ppppotentially good as we go into early spring!

To keep the thread ticking over…. with a tenuous connection to Scotland, I admit…..around 19-20hrs of continuous snowfall on 1st Feb delayed my return to north of the border for 24hrs. High Littleton

No, but they tied in with a lot of the cold ramping that went on in here which people find acceptable but moan when people post mild charts.

Dare I use the word POTENTIAL. +162 GFS!

We can dream GFSP 00z ends like this

Extended 00z EPS ensemble mean shows quite a strong -ve height anomaly / trough over Azores, especially days 11-12, while downstream stronger ridging building N and NW across the NE Atlantic. However, suggests a fine line between mild southerlies and a cold continental flow, depending on where surface high pressure sets up - which the mean will blend out the different options.

Indeed, and not too dissimilar to the 18z run

EC46, South to SW winds with the trough anchored to our west - danny.

Glencoe yesterday before the mild weather sets in

Might as well get the gairden dug then eh?

Got to disagree a bit with that. This winter without doubt has been a fail - but not just for teleconnections. It was a fail for the model forecasting industry too, most especially in our neck of the woods for the UKMO....and I suspect you dont see them as teleconnective forecasters. Your reading of "overarching authority" I would take as a theory of where the signals appear to be taking us. This is not certainty - it is a reading of signals. Those who take them as certainty are either irritated by the attempt in the first place (though I've never been able to work out why anyone would be irritated with another person's attempt to make sense of a very complex process and put out a forecast on a weather site) or have no faith in our ability to try and make sense of the process....and this is usually very strongly flagged by those posters being the ones who choose never to make an attempt at a forecast at more than about 10 days' range. I have absolutely no problem with that - there is a lot of sense in sticking to what can be reasonably seen as falling within a window of reasonable model accuracy, but where I do have an issue is when those characters then choose to pour cold water on the attempts of others to make sense of the longer term.....particularly given that the critic tends to stay within the conservative window of accuracy and then pour scorn on those who are trying to work further ahead. That's just bad from every angle - humanity would have made next to no process throughout history if progress were left to those with that kind of mindset. "Extenuating circumstance"? - is that just code for another unforeseen factor? Surely it must be....and by its very definition that falls, once again, within the envelope of reading signals. Not sure what point you are trying to make here other than suggesting that teleconnective forecasting ignores the bits that disagree with the "theory" - whatever theory for a season that might be. No - certainly dont agree with that. All signals are valid and I'm sure we are going to learn a lot from this season. Furtado put out an excellent tweet over the weekend on exactly this topic. Test and observe. Isnt that science? And "if revisited at all" - you are just being negative here. You know very well there have been papers produced over the last 20 years on a range of forecasting developments, from solar impacts to vortex disruption - and all of these were seen as fringe science prior to investigation. I remember being on weather forums when low solar impacts were chuckled at by serious posters....and then peer reviewed literature silenced them. The same to an extent has happened with vortex disruption - and now we are wrestling with developments in our understanding of ozone circulation, different types of split, QBO phase etc etc. None of these are factors that are not revisited. Quite the opposite. You are right that certainty is limited. But I'd rather push the boundaries of that limitation rather than not even try.

You have to bear in mind that it is not unusual for GFS underestimate maximum temperatures to the lee of high ground in the west, as the model vertical resolution may not pick up the air warming to the lee of mountains as air dries out and descends (i.e. the Foehn effect) - limitations of the grid points the model uses to show temperatures may not pick up local quirks and variations in temperatures caused by the foehn effect, simply because it doesn't use enough grid points. The higher resolution 00z ECM is showing, at noon Friday, 14-15 C across NE Wales/NW Cheshire plain to the north of the Snowdonia mountains, also pockets of mid-teens across Devon and west Wales in lee of high ground. Can't post the paywall chart unfortunately.

Never seen so much snow in my life Obertauern , Austria getting my snow fix 2.5 meters in places

Exeter still signposting an undercutting scenario i see. HP to the N/NE with Atlantic systems moving in with snow to high ground and perhaps low levels.. I'm hopeful things may look much rosier in the garden in the coming days wrt NWP.

Two words for that chart from a coldies perspective. Absolutely horrifying!

In such situations we do not refer to the run as being either an outlier or without support, instead we hail it as a trendsetter!

APPOLOGY LETTER FROM WINTER dear customers I am writing this to apologise for the utterly bad service that I have provided to you since November which is now llikely to last for the rest of the contract period untill next season. we promised that the coverage of cold will be much better as we had installed a new MJOdevice and a SSW heater to boost the reception, however these proved unhelpful. I know we kept sending you updates of our engineering work and our gfs crew kept on stating that the progress signals all kept on pointing to a 10 or 16 day period where all clients will have the full benefit of our freeze service. Again this did not happen and we had to sit back and read all the comments from dishearted customers. saying this we did manage to squeeze in a few good days where some postcodes benefited from the cold and transmition of snow was successful.  On top of all this it is with regret to inform you that the administrators have been called in now and the pressure has become high and will be Hard to shift further North to our competitirs for us to benefit. It's highly likely that a new director called SPRING will take over and put even more heat on the fire. It's not been a good season but we will do everything in our hands to find out why it went all wrong. We do hope to be rescued and come back next season when it's our turn again and provide a better service.  Appologied again for all the wet towels that have been left. Yours WINTER

GFSP says hold my beer, we are not done with Winter just yet

I guess a stopped clock is right twice a day.... 00z runs holding zero promise in my eyes. Once this weeks mildness is blown away it looks like a return to wind and rain. Nothing to whet the appetite in this busted flush of a winter.

APPOLOGY LETTER FROM WINTER dear customers I am writing this to apologise for the utterly bad service that I have provided to you since November which is now llikely to last for the rest of the contract period untill next season. we promised that the coverage of cold will be much better as we had installed a new MJO device and a SSW heater to boost the reception, however these proved unhelpful. I know we kept sending you updates of our engineering work and our gfs crew kept on stating that the progress signals all kept on pointing to a 10 or 16 day period where all clients will have the full benefit of our freeze service. Again this did not happen and we had to sit back and read all the comments from dishearted customers. saying this we did manage to squeeze in a few good days where some postcodes benefited from the cold and transmition of snow was successful. On top of all this it is with regret to inform you that the administrators have been called in now and the pressure has become high and will be Hard to shift further North to our competitirs for us to benefit. It's highly likely that a new director called SPRING will take over and put even more heat on the fire. It's not been a good season but we will do everything in our hands to find out why it went all wrong. We do hope to be rescued and come back next season when it's our turn again and provide a better service. Appologied again for all the wet towels that have been left. Yours WINTER

I agree that the NAO is a source of great annoyance when it comes to our weather and getting prolonged cold. But having lots of +NAO winters/months is absolutely nothing new. There have been plenty of times where we have had solidly +NAO periods. The most recent of course was the late 80s and through the 90's. Going back much further, there was a run of 12 consecutive +NAO winters (Dec - March) at the turn of the century. A further run of 9 out of 11 winters just after the first world war returned +NAO. Many of these were very strongly +NAO winters as well. Now, we may or may not be in the midst of another protracted run (still a way to go before we can start comparing with those periods though). Personally I doubt it though, we are in a solar min, so I would expect there to be at least as many -NAO winters as +NAO over the next few years. But quite frankly, whos knows at this stage. And it is worth remembering as well, that the NAO of course is not a driver in its own right. Merely a reflection of anomalous pressures in the North Atlantic, simply returned in SD form.

The NAO Index for January came in at +0.59 (NOAA CPC) The NAO has been: Negative in 2 of the last 16 months Negative in 3 of the last 32 Dec-Mar winter months Negative in 1 of the last 24 Dec-Feb winter months Positive the last 8 Decembers Positive the last 8 Januarys source: @griteater That is what we are fighting so the default is likely to be not cold for the UK, and we have to look for background signals that will flip that. I cannot see it ATM, especially with the MJO now stalling in Phase 7, and that is assuming no interference, unlikely based on this Winter's performance. We can hope, but the likelihood is clearly unfavorable.