Timmytour

Over the last 18 years, the coldest February we've had has not been as cold as the coldest December, January or March. It's time for February to step up to the winter plate. I'm going for 1.7c

That's the 78/79 evolution we're looking for!

The closest match i can find to this month is January 1927. Don't know if anyone could put up one of the graphs mapping the daily CETs longside this years? But I reckon it would be a pretty close match. For possible pointers...... Jan 1927 CET to the 18th.....5c.....Final CET 4.6C February 1927 was colder than average without being spectacularly so, with some snow early on in the month

Thanks Ian for the usual informative stuff. But a word of caution....don't go using the phrase "nitty gritty" on TV or radio or you'll have the Political Correct Police after you! http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/nitty-gritty.html

Daily mean temperatures are for the 24 hour period 9am-9am (GMT)

Genuinely can't see where you're getting that from. Looking at the Min predicted temps on GFS, at 9am it's threes and fours andby the time you get to 3pm it's all nines and tens and then doesn't fall below 7 all the way through to 9am the next day. While 5c itself would be a step above the average, it wouldn't surprise me to see the mean CET for sunday touch 7c at least

With, after this brief cold clip, the models tending towards the mild side again, I'm thinking that the pattern of Daily CETs looks a little like what we had in 1957. I hope it's not history repeating itself as the February of that year was very undistinguished!!

Not completely ruling out my 6.4c

My concern is, not just the current trend away from a prolonged spell, but through the recent tricky synoptics, have accurate the Met Office appear to have been. If the access to the models they currently enjoy continue to enable the kind of accurate info that IF has been putting up here all through the winter, then this forum could die a death! At least we can usually always compensate for dire looking outlooks from the models by speculating that an SSW or suchlike will dramatically change things....but imagine seeing such outlooks and then having a reliably accurate Meto confirm they have a high confidence in them!!!

There's not going to be much snow if indeed any at all....so I suggest the last thing you want to do is take it with a pinch of salt as that would be enough to melt any we do get!

True,,,but we got to the 25th DEC 78 from here a week earlier... That's not a million miles away from where the models are taking us next week and if we get the SSW that did seem on the cards for a few runs it's not inconceiveable that we could end up with a good start to February. That said, it's a long shot, but I can certainly see no point in writing off any further opportunities till mid Feb like some (not you I hasten to add!) have said EDIT...just realised I had Jan not DEC!

I think a look at late December 1978 shows how quickly things COULD change....not saying they will mind... FROM DEC 25 To DEC 31 Different synoptics already in place at the start of that 5 day period for sure.....but perhaps.....(not withstanding my earlier post) the seeds of something similar are already in place regarding the strat

Just a note of caution for those either expecting no breakdown of the cold or just a temprorary breakdown of it. The last few pages of this thread, for about the same time last year, were also full of hopes https://forum.netweather.tv/topic/79144-model-output-discussion-19th-january-2014-18z-onwards/page-131 Hopefully this year is a completely different proposition <fingers crossed>....nevertheless there's the similar talk of evolution set ups and NH pattern changes boding well for the future....

Am I right in thinking that pesky shortwave was there all last winter and effectively prevented any movement west of Scandinavian airmass?

To be fair Mushy, i think he did say he agrees with the met solution. Very tricky for them because, not only is the track not pinned down, and there's a fine line between it being snow or rain/sleet, but the accumulations if it's rain would not be worthy of any sort of warning, while if it's snow it may well be worth warning for some disruption. Very tricky for them imo

That IS 2013

JAN 2013 RUNNING MEAN CET AVERAGE 8th..8c..Cold set in 12th..6.2c..Bitter cold set in 19th..3.6c 25th..2.7c..end of spell 31st..3.5c

Good spot! One of only 11 Novembers since 1700 colder than any of the ensuing winter months, three of which occured in the decade 1910-19 while the only one since then was November 88. Only 1782 had a colder November than 1915

haha....... nobody slags off the Met Office quite like Jimmy greaves in this vintage clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y61Jv9nIOvI&feature=youtu.be

There was a run in 2008 of 18 days from 28th November to 15th December. From thereon the Daily mean CET went from just over 4c to reach an average of 10c for the two days 21 and 22 December. After that, going into January, another sequence of 17 days built up, with a further one of 14 days in the first two weeks of February . So very conceiveable that on a local lever 20 consecutive days would have been reached. In 2010 it was only a daily mean CET of 6c on the 11th December that stopped a run of 30 days and broke it up into 17 and 12 instead......so very possible to imagine snow lying all that time. 2010 was very close, but you have to go back to 1952 to find a thread-defined lengthy cold spell that started in November....and before that you have to go back to the decade of the 1870s which bizarrely had three such occasions!

Here's how certain things are.......taking thursday coming up.... The 18z had it... It's now on the 6z I don't see how with such a difference in under a week, anything in the longer term can have a "high probability"?

Nice bit of snow here in Stevenage...very pretty to see it falling and got a covering....made me come over all nostalgic!!

With the Chuckle Brothers currently playing on the models with the air masses over the UK, I thought I'd take a look at notable, rather than extraordinary, cold spells the UK has had. For this, I've defined a Notable Lengthy Cold Spell to be a period of 20 or more successive days where the daily mean CET has remained at or below 4c. Of course the years of 1947 and 1963 would be the first that many think about in this context and indeed, at 57 and 73 days respectively, they are definite highlights. But our more recent cold spells have been marked by short severity rather than length, so for example the winter including Dec 2010 doesn't fit in here. In fact the most recent spell to make it's way in here under my definition is from 2013, which is also the only spell in over 240 years of records to extend into the month of April. 2013 ended a record wait for such a spell of 16 years. And yet its lateness in the season probably detracted from how well received it was in here! The only other waits in double figures were the ones that ended in 1979 (14 years) and 1929 (10 years). But through the 20th century as a whole, the average wait was only three years!!!! To me that seems incredible...an average wait of only three years while we waited 13 years in the internet age for one that didn't land in the prime of winter! I wonder what this place would be like if one did? I wonder if we could be on the cusp of one now? <crossed fingers>

T132 on the GFS The wind over the SE in a completely different direction to the previous run, to illustrate how early we hit FI What's of a little interest here to me is that Russian high which seems to take a little look to see whether it fancies diving south west over the UK. It doesn't.......this time. But it has a lot more of a look in this run than previous ones and I'm wondering if it will find it too irresistible in a couple of runs time.......

Things you pick yup from a meltdown..... Nobody demands to know why a model was showing mild only a day earlier for a few days ahead and then suddenly flipped to show cold....but the other way around and it seems the world and his mother wants an inquiry into why the models are so bad! It's interesting to see some folks in the Mod thread claiming they were gunned down for suggesting a breakdown was on the cards when a day earlier they were gunning people down themselves for suggesting it was! anyways....it's only 10 days ago that the GFS started showing tentative signs of a potential cold spell coming up when the mood was as depressed as I've ever seen it in the Mod thread I think! So things can quicky turn and this time it's not ten days of mild mush to go through to get there