The near-miss severe cold spell of Dec. 1923/Jan. 1924

[LetItSnow!]

The Christmas & New Year period of 1923/1924 featured a close call to some extremely cold air but was a case of bad (or good, depending on your viewpoint) luck! 

 

To set the scene, Nov. 1923 was one of the coldest November’s of the 20th century. In comparison, the first half of December was much milder with a strong westerly flow and spells of unsettled weather and high pressure alternating. All change on the 18th as high pressure begins to retrogress and by the 19th we’re in a very cold northerly wind. 

A very expansive region of cold air is beginning to build over Scandinavia, but blocking isn’t strong enough to hold and we end up in a chilly northwesterly instead  

 

Christmas Eve finds another short lived northerly burst bringing snow showers and then on Christmas Day, mild air from the Atlantic moves in courtesy of an area of low pressure  This brought widespread frontal snowfall. A white Christmas for most.

 

A closer view shows another round of northerly (NNE) winds bringing in another round of cold air. What’s notable to me is the depth of cold across Scandinavia; minus 15-17 is widespread but there’s a patch of close to minus 30 at 850hpa! 

The westerly push is too strong and any cold air is pushed away into the 29th.

 

New Year’s Eve 1923 is, once again, very close to being cold, but we’re under the influence of mild westerlies

 

 

By early January, 1924 the cold pool is still over to our east, seemingly not going anywhere and still quite intense. 

It isn’t until the 9th when, bizarrely, an undercutting low ends up dislodging the cold pool and sending it over Scotland and Shetland. This looks like a proper dumping of snow across the Midlands, northern England and Scotland. Impressive how the cold pool is still existent at this point  

Finally by the 12th the cold has dissipated and we’re in a very mild southwesterly. Overall Jan. 1924 was actually quite a mild month.

 

If there hadn’t been such an influence from the Atlantic this could have been a lengthy cold spell for the history books. But alas, it didn’t quite work out that way. Must have been intense across Europe though. Would be frustrating to witness something like this, though at least we did get some snow events from it.

 

Reports from this spell:

 

Dec. 1923: Very snowy in the north, 17 days of lying snow at Deerness, 11 at York and around 2-6 in the London area, mostly occurring around and on Christmas Day. Up to 6 inches snow across Yorkshire on Christmas Day and 8 inches in Glasgow, the heaviest fall since 1890. A very active thunderstorm reported on the 19th with vivid lightning display in the Southampton area.  

Jan. 1924: Overall a mild month but with a very snosy spell the week ending the 12th. The 9th was the coldest day of the month with most stations not exceeding freezing, and some reports of 25F being the maximum temperature that day. Also on the 9th, the heaviest snowfall in many years recorded across northern England with severe drifts. London had its snowiest spell for many years. 

[LetItSnow!]

Not too dissimilar to what would happen 100 years later, a cold winter over Scandinavia but we never quite bit the cherry. 

 

Interestingly, 1923 had a near miss for both extreme heat and extreme cold for the UK as the summer of 1923 had blistering heat at times across the continent and as the chart shows, some brutal cold later too. Only in November did we tap into it.