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danm You've got me peering out the window! I'm only a few miles up the road. No sunshine yet, but if I squint and look north I can make out a few breaks in the clouds. That said, though dull, April hasn't felt so bad so far. Probably because my expectations have lowered massively from the last few months of deluge. I've also been lucky that when I've wanted to be outside, there's been some brightness. Sometimes ones impression of a month is based on little more than coincidence.

Metwatch I should have gone to the express with that forecast, as it was much better than their usual nonsense!

donnerundblitzer The NAO is basically the difference in pressure between the Azores and Iceland. The North Atlantic Oscillation WWW.METOFFICE.GOV.UK The term 'North Atlantic Oscillation' is used by meteorologists to refer to variations in the large-scale surface pressure gradient in the North Atlantic region. So low pressure over the Azores and higher pressure to the north gives a negative NAO. This has been the case a few times this winter, but the jet hasn't been south-shifted enough for the low pressure to miss the UK. Instead low pressure has been tracking along the south of the country. The rainfall anomalies in March had Southern England in particular, much wetter than normal. In the northwest of Scotland, where the low pressure would normally track, they had a drier and sunnier month than normal.

BlueSkies_do_I_see I'm not certain I've done this right, but I think if you round each month's record down to the nearest integer, the mean across that hypothetical year would be around 12.6c. I'd be happy for someone to check my work on this. Also worth noting that neither January or March reached the required value, so we'd probably need to hit at least one record to make 12c, even from this very mild start.

Mild and damp continues. 9.3c & 91 mm please

Bats32 You're not joking! A low sets up on the 26th, and just festers for 9 days. The best conditions on offer over that period are - "not too windy I guess". You'd struggle to draw a less pleasant run.

Wynn D Woo There is a good reason why it's not symmetrical though. Solar noon is 30 mins later at the end of Feb than it is at the end of October, so we get half the benefit of DST for free! As we move through March, Noon slips back and that benefit is partly lost by the end of the month. My personal preference would be to switch around the second week of March. By then Sunrise would be earlier than after the October change, which feels reasonable.

The models have been hinting at more suppressed temps towards the end of the month. Once we hit April though, with the strength of the sun and the warmth of the Atlantic, I'd expect the first SW waft of the month to push us over 20c. Beyond that it's tea leaves really. But I have a feeling we might struggle for Maxima until a little later in the summer. 20c - 4th April 25c - 18th June

My recollection of the March is that it was pretty dismal up until the day lockdown was announced. From then on it was blue skies every day! That was the end of a notably wet spell too, so like now we were desperate for high pressure. (I've just gone and checked the Met Office look back, and it was the wettest Feb, and 5th wettest month full stop)

Don Another related question. Could the March absolute max come in lower than January's? Still very early days, but if we end up with mean winds East or North of East due to the SSW we'd struggle to hit the 20c needed.

6.6c & 82mm please

Good point. We've seen apparently nailed on patterns switch at relatively short time scales, more than once. Most of the time disappointment follows a fuzzy ensemble resolving the wrong way. Does this mean that the ensembles are insufficiently perturbed? If guess that In an ideal world the ensembles will cover the broad probability space, with at least one of them getting it right.

Past mild and into warm today out there IMO! I left my jacket indoors for my lunchtime walk, and was still warm. Lots more gaps in the cloud here than originally modelled, and the sun has a bit of oomph to it at last. I'd enjoy it more were it rarer, but days like this in February are becoming troublingly common.

It's a matter of fact that (with the recent of the exception of the AI models) the models work from observations and apply physics from there. Agreement is irrelevant. Updates seem to be every 18 months or so, but it varies by model. Whenever people post parallel outputs, that's because the met organisations are testing updates to their models. At lot of the MJO predictions have been based on composites. That's good old fashioned pattern matching to my mind. Just looking at different patterns!

Ok, so the winter has been a let down. That on its own isn't worth much investigation in a warming climate. That said, I'm interested by the NWPs persistent forecasting of HL blocking. Particularly in the last 3/4 weeks. Remembering that the NWP models are just the physical interactions between packets of air, there was something leading the suggestion that a mid-atlantic ridge or even a north Atlantic block would set up at day 12. For me it's not sufficient to say there is a bias towards blocking. That's the symptom. It's not on every run all the time, so something in the configuration would have led to blocking but for an unmodelled interaction. Or there's something about the initial configuration that allows the bias to take hold. I assume much smarter people than I are already looking at it to improve modelling. If anyone is aware of any blogs or papers on the topic I'd be interested in seeing them.