BleakMidwinter

Midlands Ice Age I found this very interesting - spraying seawater onto the surface of sea-ice to increase its thickness and resilience- only at initial stages of research testing on thin layers at present, and not considered a 'cure' but could at least help in some areas where loss of sea ice affects the area more widely... Pumped up: will a Dutch startup’s plan to restore Arctic sea-ice work? | Polar regions | The Guardian WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM As the Arctic warms, devastating the climate and ecosystems, an old idea used to create skating rinks could be deployed to restore melting ice caps, despite scepticism from some experts

I liked the *Ingham Singularity* but I can't remember who suggested it...

And conveniently, here is a blow by blow description of that weather system

I'm clueless when it comes to interpreting charts, but one thing I have become aware of, trying frantically to keep up reading, is just how many of the posters here whose knowledge I really respect have posted in the last day or so to say that they have never seen charts like this, never seen this kind of run for January, can't remember this or that in recent decades, etc. It feels to me like, even if we end up with a short chilly phase and back to the Atlantic washing-machine's 'Rinse&Repeat' cycle, this has already been something dramatic and noteworthy. Isn't all forecasting entirely reliant on previous modeling compared against actual weather outcomes? So the very fact that the models are converging onto such unusual and startling charts... isn't that already noteworthy, whether they do or don't turn out to be accurate predictions? (Forgive me if I've got technical terms like 'charts' and 'converging' wrong... I really am reliant on those of you who explain your comments, and I tend generally to view the charts as pretty Rorschacht blobs... )

Thankyou!!!!!!! I have been following these discussions for over a dozen years now and have never had so much difficulty finding reliable information about the interpretation of data.

Oh jings, thank you SO MUCH for this! This kind of clear, reasoned, structured explanation is the reason I keep reading this discussion even though around 75% of the posts are almost meaningless to me even after 12 years on the forum... Thankyou. It's appreciated!

Yeah, I was happily remembering that one too as I read the post!

I made the mistake of laughing aloud and showing my husband the chainsaw-wielding dolphin… oh dear…

While we're at it with putting together the 'dream team' of people who post clear and well-written explanations so that those of us who are far from expert can understand, can I put in a word for @Man With Beard whose posts are often a relief from a whirling ocean of TLAs and obscure in-jokes! And yes, @johnholmes is *always* really brilliant to read, even when you're only a very lowly amateur!

We commented this morning about the smell of trees as we swam at the local quarry… different times of year you suddenly feel very aware of your surroundings, the trees or birds or changing light…

Beautiful sunshine this morning as I swam at a local quarry - water temp 16ºC and air temp only 6ºC... warmed up later in the morning, but heavy rain off and on since midday. Very autumnal!

Ah there's 'Scotland' and then there's 'Edinburgh'.... A micro-climate all of its own, sitting in a bowl with hills to south and west, the North Sea to the east and then the Forth to the north... in 35 years living there, it was incredible how often "the whole of the UK" would be bathed in baking sun or drowned in deluges or buried in snow, according to the news, and there we'd be, not having that weather...! Remember that famous satellite photo from a few years back, the 2009-10 winter iirc, with the entire country white? Yep, that was the year everyone remembers as the really snowy one but Edinburgh had not a bloomin' flake... Then Nov 2010 it started snowing and basically snowed every day for six weeks and the online companies refused to deliver orders (thanks, Tesco and Amazon!) we needed the Army in February to help clear the 8 inches of ice on the pavements and many side-roads...! There was quite a bit of snow in the 1980s, though - plenty of sledging after school most winters as I recall it. But not the gigantic drifts and the weeks on end of white streets and no cars that happened in 1979 and in 2010...

Sitting watching tv in a room with window to the south, me sitting facing west, and for the last 15 minutes there's been a steady supply of gigantic strobe-flashes to the SW of Telford... extraordinarily odd, though - presumably because of the fog, the lightning is only lighting up one area of the sky, quite low down, like some weird stage-lighting effect. I did wonder if it was some kind of lighting or white-only fireworks or suchlike, but some of the flashes have included a very distinctive lightning-streak running near-horizontally (which is also odd!).... Radar-map shows heavy lightning down by the South Shropshire hills, so 30-40 miles away - but what a light-show I'm getting! No sound of thunder yet...

Ummm.... not everywhere. It was my first winter in Scotland, last year of primary school, and our weather project included taking the temperature outdoor at noon every schoolday for a fortnight, and it never went above freezing. The drifts were often above my knee-high socks, and not just in a few odd corners, I still remember the unfamiliar sensation of snow against the bare skin at the back of my knees! And I saw people skiing to the office, in pinstripe suits, trousers tucked into woolly socks, wearing woolly hats and a briefcase strapped to their backs... and suddenly the city was full of men wearing kilts because they are so much warmer than trousers... It was my first Scottish winter and I was really pleased to discover that Edinburgh was exactly like books, all snowy... ...then I had to wait another three decades for another one like that, but the 78/79 one was apparently even snowier!

Apparently it rained lightly about 3:30am last night in Telford - our black car (which hasn't moved in three days...) now looks like we spent hours off-roading!

Good point - not sure about rivers, though... think they may change more than sea or deep still-water? I normally swim in a quarry which has been about 15-16ºC for a few weeks now, down from 19-20ºC in July... I know it changes very very slowly (last year's massive heatwave made no difference at all for almost three weeks and then only one or two degrees!) but think the river is more volatile...

Some friends and I swam down Severn this evening at Ironbridge for a while- incredibly, the water temp was 20°C…!!! In September?!

round here (Telford) the blackberries start being ripe enough to pick in the last few days of July most years. I usually try to get most of my picking done in the middle two weeks of August so I can have the blackberry jam/jelly done and out of the way before the rest of the foraging and preserving…

Interesting to read the way people word their views on summer turning to autumn - clearly, some people mourn the loss of summer and wish it wasn't turning onwards into autumn... I've never been a heat-lover, and maybe that's part of why I feel pleased about the arrival of autumn - but also perhaps because for me it's a good thing? All those hedgerows to pick, the jam and jelly and pickles and syrups to make, that lovely feeling of knowing you can taste bright summer fruits and crisp young vegetables in midwinter, as you pour Hedgerow Syrup over pancakes, or slice pickled onions into a cheese sarnie...

For years, my own personal calendar has had the start of autumn in early August - not so much determined by daylight-length or temperatures, as by what the plants are doing... so Feb/Mar/April are spring in my reckoning when everything wakes up, buds appear, green shoots emerge... May/Jun/Jul are summer when the flowering happens on the majority of native species.... August is the start of harvesting in hedgerow and field, on through Sept/Oct... then the growth dies back or goes dormant on the majority of native species for Nov/Dec/Jan for winter... It upsets my sun-worshipping friends, of course, but I stubbornly stick to it - today is distinctly autumnal!

MIA, thankyou so much for doing these - I used to follow in the past when it was just charts posted and an occasional comment, but I am (slowly!) starting to understand more because of how clearly you explain it all. Just wanted to say - your hard work is appreciated!!

A heavy dusting of snow in Telford today- quite wet ground so I think tonight’s freeze may make Monday morning interesting for many! I’ll be cycling a couple of miles to swim in a local bit of open water, my first try at keeping on swimming right through winter… water about 3 degrees today I’m told…

Again, many thanks to those of you who type out your reasons for suggesting that X may happen or that Y is no longer as likely... it really really helps those of us eagerly following but with only a fraction of your knowledge and experience! (Also, @Allseasons-si and @Eagle Eye, can I cluck round being all Mother Hen, and urge you to remember to look after yourselves in amongst Everything, make sure you eat and so on, if you can... Take care, and my very best wishes in your different sets of circs...)

Did someone call? (I rarely post in here as I know so little about models so just lurk, but can I just grab the opportunity to thank all of you who explain why the splodge you've posted means an increased chance of X or Y - it really really helps those of us trying to learn )

Oh, I dunno - my parents live in a draughty great barn of an old house with minimal insulation possible (short of cladding the entire exterior of a stone0-built house) and the cheapest winter bills they had in 45+ years was the year when Edinburgh was buried under snow from late November til February - it's astonishing what good insulation 18 inches of snow on the slates provides!