summer blizzard

The suggestion for the moment is certainly the cyclonic variety (humid and cloudy away from the south east). I think the more sustained pattern change is more likely to come from a collapsing northerly with the high toppling over the UK.

A repeat of 1995 will do me, not too much to ask for.

It will be interesting to see how this dry spell will impact water values and how quickly are poor infrastructure leads us to trouble again if it keeps up. Here i'm almost certain that we've gone the 13th Feb-12th Mar with less than 10mm.

The sun no doubt has an influence but i blame the protracted La Nina domination. ENSO is currently near neutral however. In terms of sun, solar flux data actually shows Nov 11 as the peak thus far.

A ridge to the west in my opinion would probably favour a drier setup (less frontal risk, precipitation dependent on showers) but it does'nt mean a warm or cool one really because if pressure is high then even with cool uppers the sun will have enough strength to nudge maxima. Having looked at the analogues the trend remains with 1997 in the fray as well... QBO (Neutral) 2008 2004 1997 1990 1980 MEI (Neutral) 2002 2001 1997 1985 1984 1975 1968 1967 1963 1961 1954 PDO (Neutral-Negative) 1999 1990 1973 GLAMM (Neutral) 2004 1997 1991 1990 1987 1981 1970 1969 January-February 1997 1990 2004 All had hot spells which is good but i imagine hell is a mixture of August 2004 and August 2007 in terms of shear humidity.

Not really doing anything in Leeds, perhaps light drizzle.

I'm going to be wildly optimistic and point out that the last cold March we had was followed by the hottest month on record - 2006.

I'm not against snow but i'd rather we got a flip to a warm high. Of interest to me is that we could go a full monthly period with less than 10mm of precipitation. Phillip Eden suggests that the second half of Feb actually only saw 2.2mm.

I know a pub which just gets cans from Tesco.

A lovely FI..

Yes, looking out of the window it looked great and so i went out with no coat. The wind is pretty chilly although it was manageable.

Lovely hazy sunshine today.

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/qbo.u30.index QBO will go westerly this month.

Amplified by the fact that many pubs throw a BBQ.

Darn the tight field, my errors would normally lend themselves to a fair few points still but the field is so tight,

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/qbo.u30.index No update yet.

May have got it the wrong way round but that looks Nino ish to me so the East Pacific would be the more active.

Interesting output from the models this morning showing two differing outcomes. My personal opinion is that the default pattern at the moment is the one which we have just seen as in high pressure very close to the UK (be that south or north i don't know) and so i think that other than a few days it is likely that pressure will build in akin to the ECWMF or GEM. Chart of the day for me is day 10 GEM..

Not a cloud. One of those days where you look out of the window and could be forgiven for thinking its June and 30C.

7/10. Pretty cool, not too wet, lack of gales, good solid cold spell in late January. Would have been higher but December and February were 'nearly' months.

Hadley also adjusts to stay in line with Manley.

Lovely today and should be good for the next few days. Also of note is we still look to be waiting a week for precipitation so that's 3 weeks potentially with what i suspect here is less than 5mm.

I thought that March-June 2010 was nice because it was a mostly sunny period and the June got quite warm, july 2010 however was horribly humid and dull.

It appears the troposphere is hanging on longer than i thought. Change mine to 5.6C, 1C below the 1981-2010 average.

Certainly a +QBO and strengthening (i think will be a positive) but i'm not so sure about the MEI, we still have an active MJO and warm waters to the west of the ENSO zone. I don't think we can rule out +MEI conditions even if close to neutral. I'll check.