Wingman Blue

Nor me!

Little Rissington’s weather is often quite different from Banburyshire’s, particularly in regard to snow. It’s in the Cotswolds proper and it tends to catch the western cotswold weather. It’s a different micro-climate to here, north of Chippy, partly due to the elevation and it can be thick snow above Burford but raining (or dry) ten miles to the north.

1962 had a very warm September, 27.8C on the 3rd….?

Grey today but colder. High of 6.9•C today, a full degree lower than yesterday’s. Missed out yesterday evening, just sleety rain but overall things still getting colder.

The continent’s currently a fridge. And after a brief high of 9.2 here today it’s currently 3.1•C (Ox/Warks border) 48 hours to Christmas Day evening….

Additional to my last. In the time it took me to compose and send the previous message, the temperature dropped half a degree. Strange.

Temperature rose to a heady 9.7.C after a foggy dawn of 5.0. It seems that the models are very good at same old, same old, but struggle with mixed messages. I’m still not convinced that the train will be cancelled, delayed a few days perhaps, probably due to the wrong type of snow…

Good afternoon Midlands. Currently the heat of the day down in Hornton is a balmy 2.0•C. That’s after 12 hours of frost overnight and now with a Baltic breeze. Be interesting when that Saharan surge gets here.

It’s 22nd December. BFTE was 28th February. Still plenty of time…

Sounds reasonable, sensible even. We shall see!

Personally think it was a natural 20-year cycle. I think 1930-50 was a particularly cold term, though I wasn’t there to see it!

Must have been the same December 22nd 1962. That’s it! No White Christmas again! Winter’s over….

Agree entirely. If you’re unfortunate to live close to a southern tidal area, you won’t get many snowy nirvanas but even central Birmingham saw some harsh winters between 62 and 89. It was a regular news bulletin in the 1970’s that the StaffordshireMoorlands were cut off, all roads blocked. Even remember Christmas Eve 1968 (I think), at my grandparents house in Gravesend Kent, watching the snow coming down thick and fast to a depth of 10” (I used my school ruler to measure it). ’63 was something else, I was off school for over a month, for a time even the buses weren’t running in suburban Birmingham. They were tipping the coal wagons at Saltley gas works and the load would come out as a single solid lump, sometimes with the wagon floor still attached! Yes, winters before the twenty-year warm blip from 88, really were better!

Don’t trust anything beyond 48 hours seems the form horse at the moment!

I agree but in the pub at 1800 last night I was told the forecast had flipped to mild over Christmas, I believe BBC and some other media weather facility. That was 15 hours ago but maybe it’s like trying to hit a moving target as I mentioned two or three days ago?

Agree with the above. If the models are really that wrong is there any point in following them? FWIW, red sky in the morning (shepherd’s pie for tea) and -2•C at sun-up. Ignoring the froth and bluster about the 06Z for now, it’s usually mild-biased anyway, and still expecting some snow overnight Christmas Day-Boxing Day. Still believe it’s too cold for an ‘average’ winter, whatever that is.

Wise words

I don’t think this Saharan surge has got the legs. I think it’ll be snibbed off by the Greenland block shortly after it makes landfall on early Christmas Day. I just don’t buy this ‘double figures’ malarkey, I honestly believe it’s just another flip-flop. Feel free to remind me if I’m wrong…

Umm this ‘exceptional mild’… where’s it coming from and how big is it? Has a volcano just erupted in mid-Atlantic?? just asking, for a friend.

We’re already cold. It’ll be mid-February before much of this island warms up. For the next six weeks there’s not a lot of warmth coming in.

Ermm…. Shall we wait for day 3?

… and very likely producing a dump ..

That ‘large portion of mild air’ is our snow resupply, ready to top up the first layer!

Or 62-3. 78-79 started on the 22nd December in central Brum at roughly 22.00.! From then until early March we had snow or ice around until the final thaw on March 14th. 62-63 the coal froze into mammoth heaps at the pit heads and the roads were just sheets of ice. Our old dear left a bag of carrots in the hall while she lit the fire. When she went back to them they’d frozen!

For those prognosticating about the sweet spot in all this, statements like ‘only good in the north’, or ‘once again, nothing for the south’ are no help whatsoever! Please be more specific, north of X, a line between Y and Z would be a help, even the proverbial ‘north of the M4’ would be a help, otherwise it’s like the incredibly vague seer in Life of Brian, “…and there’l come a time when things happen, and lots of other things too…”