Tony47

Dead right about Feb 86. I lived near York then and recall the bitter cold (CET well below zero), but so little snow. The dry cold was so severe that many hedges and shrubs were 'burned' by the cold. I call it the forgotten winter because of the lack of snow for most in Britain - except for the east coast fringes.

Yeah, and me. Was living in Gloucester then and experienced the lowest temperature I've ever experienced. - -15.5C (or 4' Fahrenheit.) The snow squeaked underfoot. A fantastic time.

I'm reminded of the Feb 1986 winter which was the second coldest of the century and had a minus CET. (Only Dec 2010 has achieved that since). But I call it the forgotten winter because, apart from some east coast fringe areas, it was virtually dry, with very little snow. (I was living near York at the time) It's always the snowy winters we remember. I should have said, second coldest February of the century. Sorry.

Agreed swfc. Bearing in mind we're still in official Autumn, and after last winter's washout, I'd take what I'm seeing with everything going.

I'm 75 and so I had and enjoyed many snowy winters including 62-63 (living in Birmingham then) when the ground was covered in snow from Boxing Day till March 1st. Believe me, I never tired of it and was still sad when the thaw came.

Actually the freeze began on the 23rd, at least in Birmingham where I then lived, with 3 frost days before the snow arrived on the 26th. Consequently the ground was well frozen. My greatest winter unsurprisingly with the Met Office approved Edgbaston observatory showing the max temp between 23rd Dec and Mar 1st being 4 degrees C.

Sorry, that should say '1739'.

Manley, in "Climate and the British Scene", wrote that in the 1939 winter, the coldest ever recorded, the maximum temperature in London on one day was below 15'F ( - 10'C) in a gale force easterly wind. I would have thought that might just fit the bill for -20'C uppers?

My daughter and family moved out of Mytholmroyd to Halifax just 3 months before the huge flooding a few years ago. The house they left was flooded to a metre up the ground floor walls. Thankfully they are now on the side of a gentle hill and there's at least no chance of flooding for them there. But they left behind friends in the Calder valley and it was a devastating time for them. It's an horrendous thing, just as it has been for the people near Doncaster who are still trying to dry out their houses.

I have to pick upon the comment re the 1962/63 winter. I lived in Birmingham aged 15 then and kept the Met Office recordings from their official Egbaston observatory. The highest temperature between Dec 22nd and March 1st was 4 degrees Celcius. The snow that fell on Boxing day was still there at the beginning of March. It truly was a classic.

Are you sure. Looks further north to me.

Thanks for that Pete. I should have mentioned that I have been getting the Met Office's 'Weather' magazine since 1964 and would really recommend it as a great 'feet on the ground' background reading matter. Some of the articles are far too technical for me but others are excellent for those who just enjoy weather. They also, incidentally, always come with the synoptic charts of the previous month. It's also interesting to do this once in a while. Take any great or noteworthy cold/snowy spell from the past - go to the historic charts for the period, online or the paper records that I have - and go to the day exactly 5 days before the great cold spell began. You look at it and, nearly always, wonder how the heck it got from that, to this. What was a flat, zonal westerly has become anticyclonic northerly or easterly. It can cheer you up when you are going through day after day of mild weather.

I'm 73 and have been studying the weather and keeping records since I was a child, so, yes, I have experienced some great winters. [I lived in Birmingham during the 1962/63 winter, not far from the Met Office official observatory in Edgbaston, and records from there show a maximum temp of 4'C between December 22nd and March 1st. Some winter!] I've got a few observations to make. One is a riposte to the suggestions that, because of global warming, we will never get really cold weather digging in again. Well, late Feb and early March 2018 shows we can get very low temps in this country and, as a general observation, the record breaking low temps in the USA and Canada in recent years has shown that, if the synoptics are right, the cold in the arctic is as cold as it ever was once the sun disappears and the long winter night takes over. The other is regarding the forecast charts. Though those out beyond about 5/6 days can show up trends in pressure distribution or jet stream patterns, the detail really is FI. Not for nothing is the weather regarded as a classic example of chaos theory shown as fact. It's why the Met Office is so cautious in its extended predictions. And this despite state of the art computing power and a data stream that was only dreamed about when I was young. Like many on this site, I've too often been drawn into telling relatives and friends of imminent cold or snow, only to have egg on my face - yet I still do it! Finally, worth reading (you can download an Kindle though the hard copy is sadly out of print) is Gordon Manley's 'Climate and the British Scene'. A great work from the man who worked on and produced (before computers could do the number crunching) the famous Central England Temperature or CET, which we use today, albeit slightly modified, in our weather analysis. Here's to a long and snowy winter. Cheers.

A decent lasting snowfall is the holy grail for me, but surely, frost and fog are also symbols of winter? Whatever, the synoptics the last few weeks have been so different to last years that I'll take anything if it means a rest from endless zonality. In any case, it's still November. If the next weeks charts were coming up in late January i'd be disappointed but not as yet.