Woollymummy

Is this a polar hurricane? For Iceland anyway? Hope you are all ok out there.

Grassland/fodder productivity will be up, my farmer neighbour said two winters ago was a record breaking year for hay/silage production because the grass never had a check in its growth all winter, (we don't have a flooding problem). Perhaps this year will be similar, so it helps keep some farmers in business even if other factors are against them.

I love it! There is a piece written by Garrison Keillor about growing up in Minnesota and the cold, he says it's a place where in Winter, if you spit on the ground, it sounds like you've dropped your car keys. One year I'd like to go on holiday somewhere cold just to experience some extremes like that.

I love that cute little thermometer GIF. I just remembered something about unexpected snow, one NYE my hubby was playing a gig at the South Bank Centre so we got to watch the fireworks over the Thames which was awesome and inspiring and loud and beautiful, and was immediately followed by sudden snow, which surprised us all and was beautiful and kept the kids happy while we packed the van to go our hotel. Maybe something fun and unexpected and snowy will happen to some of us this winter, maybe it won't, but the fact that it might will always keep us hanging on and checking and wishing. As we will be up in Gateshead this NYE, we have a slightly better chance of needing to wear woolly hats at least

Just saw this on FB https://www.facebook.com/severeweatherEU/posts/1752667318289695

The early warmth will be fine for species who can have two shots at the whole reproduction thing, in case we get a late cold spell and then "real" Spring later. But if you are a species who can only reproduce once per year, and are tricked into doing so in December, you may be unable to repeat it in April etc and so your offspring may not survive that year. So it may be "devastating " to those species, and possibly the ones who depend on them as a food source as well.

The sun just came out, nice to not moan about gloom for a change :-)

Very unusual walk to the village shop just now, feels very pleasant outdoors, more so than it did earlier, my phone weather app says it will be 14 deg by midnight, warmer than now, and on the local forecast the "feels like" temp is always lower than the actual temp, funny! My daffs are up out of their container but not actually blooming yet, maybe they will be by Christmas Eve

It is certainly mild, but it isn't dry here, there is a pervasive dampness everywhere, clammy. Murk. The cheerful thing that I heard today was lots of blackbirds noisily calling in the back garden, very encouraging to think that it's mild enough for wildlife to survive quite happily.

My house is literally rotting. It has been too warm to have the fire lit, or to turn the heating on, but despite having windows open for ventilation I have found mouldy damp corners everywhere, and various disgusting things like condensation dripping down the walls, yuk. I have nowhere to dry laundry under cover outside, and I have been forced to turn on the heating simply to dry the house out as this weather looks like it will not dry up or cool down. I am longing for either crisp cold weather so the fire will draw properly and I can dry stuff without condensation forming, or brightness with the warmth we have. It is so gloomy and miserable even in the middle of the so-called day. Grrrrrrrrrr. I looked at the models to see if there was any change and I can't say it cheered me up, it did make me feel perhaps a Christmas swim in the sea might not be too bad this year, but I have yet to persuade my family.

definitely mulled wine now I am off the ibuprofen, and some home made pastel de nata instead of mince pies while I get on with some work and resist the urge to check the models......

We still have an unused show shovel, bought expectantly with a couple of sledges a few years ago, now probably all UV-degraded,brittle and useless. Also one whole unopened bag of rock salt

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2002GL015079/full I never thought of the effects before, not sure how it would affect weather down below.

I met an old vintage skater in Norfolk during the summer who told me all about skating on the local streams from village to village in his youth, and about competitive racing on frozen fenland ditches. I remember going out on the meres in Norfolk and Suffolk when they were frozen in the 80s, and not really skating but slipping about. In Dundee I remember finding open air ice rink walls , one or two bricks high, all ready for the ice in the winter, but never got to skate there either. Now I am grown up and finally have pair of skates, it never seems to be the right weather to wear them. Fingers crossed for Port Meadow fun in 2016?

The only few treasured times the sun has come out in the past week I have had to close the blinds as I was giving presentations with a whiteboard and people complained they couldn't see it with the sun streaming in

1) http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/14/possible-linkage-between-the-1918-el-nino-and-the-1918-flu-pandemic/ 2) http://www.elnino.noaa.gov/pandemic_1918_1919.html 3) http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2009BAMS2903.1 here's some stuff about 1918 El Niño and flu

oh dear, just read about varroa mites who parasitise the bees more when there are anomalously warm winters, so I guess the winning combination is bees+snow. Effects of warm winters on bee mortality poor bees

Bees v snow if the weather being warmer meant that bees would be saved from possible extinction but it meant your back yard never had snow ever again, or bees died out and you got snow, which would you choose? Bees or snow?

No joking , I saw the biggest bumblebee ever feeding in my neighbour's garden yesterday and despite having a cold only wanted a jumper on in the afternoon. In terms of how this relates to the model output, I do feel I now have to accept it as a mild month, and enjoy the fact my woodpile is going to last.

Here you are Feb1991blizzard: http://www.columbia.edu/~lmp/paps/martius+polvani+davies-GRL-2009.pdf

That's ok, my kids like minecraft so I have become fond of little coloured squares.... Good graph.

Piers on BBC1 This Week ......there is no global warming, apparently. There you go....

It probably didn't help the forum stay calm on "snow" days, as it whipped up the excitement, but its nice to see when more people are also seemingly fascinated with the weather.

It's not at all essential to meddle with things to include this, but you used to be able to see how many non-members were watching the model discussion, and I miss that a bit. But if it has to not come back it won't be a disaster....

The layout seems very open and clean but it seems to take more scrolling down to read everything because each post now fills the screen.