Tony47

Dead right about Feb 86. I lived near York then and recall the bitter cold (CET well below zero), but so little snow. The dry cold was so severe that many hedges and shrubs were 'burned' by the cold. I call it the forgotten winter because of the lack of snow for most in Britain - except for the east coast fringes.

Yeah, and me. Was living in Gloucester then and experienced the lowest temperature I've ever experienced. - -15.5C (or 4' Fahrenheit.) The snow squeaked underfoot. A fantastic time.

I'm reminded of the Feb 1986 winter which was the second coldest of the century and had a minus CET. (Only Dec 2010 has achieved that since). But I call it the forgotten winter because, apart from some east coast fringe areas, it was virtually dry, with very little snow. (I was living near York at the time) It's always the snowy winters we remember. I should have said, second coldest February of the century. Sorry.

Agreed swfc. Bearing in mind we're still in official Autumn, and after last winter's washout, I'd take what I'm seeing with everything going.

I'm 75 and so I had and enjoyed many snowy winters including 62-63 (living in Birmingham then) when the ground was covered in snow from Boxing Day till March 1st. Believe me, I never tired of it and was still sad when the thaw came.

Actually the freeze began on the 23rd, at least in Birmingham where I then lived, with 3 frost days before the snow arrived on the 26th. Consequently the ground was well frozen. My greatest winter unsurprisingly with the Met Office approved Edgbaston observatory showing the max temp between 23rd Dec and Mar 1st being 4 degrees C.

Sorry, that should say '1739'.

Manley, in "Climate and the British Scene", wrote that in the 1939 winter, the coldest ever recorded, the maximum temperature in London on one day was below 15'F ( - 10'C) in a gale force easterly wind. I would have thought that might just fit the bill for -20'C uppers?

My daughter and family moved out of Mytholmroyd to Halifax just 3 months before the huge flooding a few years ago. The house they left was flooded to a metre up the ground floor walls. Thankfully they are now on the side of a gentle hill and there's at least no chance of flooding for them there. But they left behind friends in the Calder valley and it was a devastating time for them. It's an horrendous thing, just as it has been for the people near Doncaster who are still trying to dry out their houses.

I have to pick upon the comment re the 1962/63 winter. I lived in Birmingham aged 15 then and kept the Met Office recordings from their official Egbaston observatory. The highest temperature between Dec 22nd and March 1st was 4 degrees Celcius. The snow that fell on Boxing day was still there at the beginning of March. It truly was a classic.

Are you sure. Looks further north to me.

Thanks for that Pete. I should have mentioned that I have been getting the Met Office's 'Weather' magazine since 1964 and would really recommend it as a great 'feet on the ground' background reading matter. Some of the articles are far too technical for me but others are excellent for those who just enjoy weather. They also, incidentally, always come with the synoptic charts of the previous month. It's also interesting to do this once in a while. Take any great or noteworthy cold/snowy spell from the past - go to the historic charts for the period, online or the paper records that I have - and go to the day exactly 5 days before the great cold spell began. You look at it and, nearly always, wonder how the heck it got from that, to this. What was a flat, zonal westerly has become anticyclonic northerly or easterly. It can cheer you up when you are going through day after day of mild weather.

I'm 73 and have been studying the weather and keeping records since I was a child, so, yes, I have experienced some great winters. [I lived in Birmingham during the 1962/63 winter, not far from the Met Office official observatory in Edgbaston, and records from there show a maximum temp of 4'C between December 22nd and March 1st. Some winter!] I've got a few observations to make. One is a riposte to the suggestions that, because of global warming, we will never get really cold weather digging in again. Well, late Feb and early March 2018 shows we can get very low temps in this country and, as a general observation, the record breaking low temps in the USA and Canada in recent years has shown that, if the synoptics are right, the cold in the arctic is as cold as it ever was once the sun disappears and the long winter night takes over. The other is regarding the forecast charts. Though those out beyond about 5/6 days can show up trends in pressure distribution or jet stream patterns, the detail really is FI. Not for nothing is the weather regarded as a classic example of chaos theory shown as fact. It's why the Met Office is so cautious in its extended predictions. And this despite state of the art computing power and a data stream that was only dreamed about when I was young. Like many on this site, I've too often been drawn into telling relatives and friends of imminent cold or snow, only to have egg on my face - yet I still do it! Finally, worth reading (you can download an Kindle though the hard copy is sadly out of print) is Gordon Manley's 'Climate and the British Scene'. A great work from the man who worked on and produced (before computers could do the number crunching) the famous Central England Temperature or CET, which we use today, albeit slightly modified, in our weather analysis. Here's to a long and snowy winter. Cheers.

A decent lasting snowfall is the holy grail for me, but surely, frost and fog are also symbols of winter? Whatever, the synoptics the last few weeks have been so different to last years that I'll take anything if it means a rest from endless zonality. In any case, it's still November. If the next weeks charts were coming up in late January i'd be disappointed but not as yet.

Re the influence of Novembers on the succeeding winters, well, I was a 15 yr old during Nov '62, living in Birmingham at the time and we had a northerly three days mid month, with three inches of snow on the ground, with a cold foggy end to the month.November 1946 was one of the mildest months on record. And both were followed by fantastic winters (from a coldies perspective that is).

Re the definition of a polar low, I searched and found a back copy of my 'Weather' magazine and the article states: "A polar low has been defined (Met Office 1964) as a 'fairly small-scale cyclone or trough (sometimes the surface isobars show only a very minor ripple) embedded in a deep cold current which has recently left northerly latitudes.'" Make of that what you will but it would seem to suggest that the trough showing up to our north-east has been too clearly defined to be a true polar low.

Adding to the record low uppers debate, in my copy of Prof Gordon Manley's 'Climate and the British Scene' now sadly out of print - (Manley it was who devised the CET) - in late December, 1739, the temp in London was 15' Fahrenheit (or -9'C) with an easterly gale blowing. Temp in Holland was -17'C or around zero Fahrenheit. That would suggest 850 uppers of around minus 25'C perhaps? Fascinating modelling atm. Tony47

My apologies for putting it in a separate thread. I meant it to go in the media thread but I misunderstood what to do. No, I don't work for the Mail - perish the thought. It was just to show that the public generally are beginning to get hints re low sunspot activity and the possible effects on our climate.

The Daily Mail today has a full pager regarding a cooling trend leading to harsher winters. It explores the position held by some climatologists that the reduction in solar output over the next 40 years or so, as evidenced by a huge drop in sunspots, will bring back the 'little ice age' scenario. Needless to say, other climatologist weigh in with the view that the Maunder minimum etc had little to do with the waxing and waning of the sun and more likely to do with volcanic activity. It's an interesting article but I don't think most seasoned Netweather members will find it adds anything to their knowledge on the subject.

The thing about the depressions giving the heavy snowfalls at the end of Dec 62 and beginning of Jan 63 is that they weren't your normal small scale lows moving from west to east along the channel. They were in fact very large deep low pressure systems coming up from Biscay, then stopping before eventually filling over the Channel because the strength of the Arctic/Scandi high was too great. They resembled in origins the one that has tracked up and over us this week but this latest one of course met no resistance. They contained huge amounts of moisture and, because the snow was falling in a surface temperature around minus 2 degrees C in a gale force easterly wind, the deposit was typically between 6 and 9 inches with considerable drifting. I lived in Birmingham at the time and, although we didn't get as much snow as some in the south midlands and south of England it was still extremely impressive. Tony 472 - un unapologetic winter/snow fanatic

I got this month's edition of 'Weather' today and found an obituary of Lorenz who died in April. He was Professor of Meteorology at Massasuchsetts Institute of Technology in the early sixties and was the one who coined the 'butterfly effect' phrase in 1972, where a tiny event in one place can have a profound effect on the weather in many others. And he was using a computer to simulate weather predictions and found, by accident, that if he only put in the very same data, but minus some decimal points - like 0.304218 shortened to 0.304,- the end result forecast was completely different. He used his experience to suggest that long range forecasting more than a few days could never happen. Too many variables. In this I think we see a parallel with our own model watching. Clearly GFS and all the others are constantly updating their data and even in six hours this will change a lot more than a few decimal points. Hence the reason why the 00z can be very different out at 300 hrs from the succeeding 6z run. Todays computer models are vastly more sophisticated and faster than in Lorenz's days but there are still too many different routes to take every few seconds. I think the best we can do, as many members have seen, is to look for trends, particularly where the forecasting computer keeps on picking up on something basic and/or recurring, eg, a preponderance of mobility/frequency or positioning of anticyclones etc. I love looking to the furthest extremes of GFS (maybe UKMO is very wise to restrict theirs to a week) but know full well that a snow-lover's dream model can be snatched away with the next set of charts. And I've learned, through bitter experience, never to see anything as set in stone. "Life's a cruel teacher but you learn, by God you learn" as Antony Hopkins said in another context in Shadowlands. It applies to us.

I lived through 3 of the 4 Feb CET's below zero but comparisons are difficult as I was living in a different part of Britain each time - ie, 1956 - Edinburgh; 1963 - Birmingham; 1986 - near York. However they all register, with sledging on the Pentland hills (I was 9 at the time) in '56, sliding on frozen ponds in '63 and seeing bus windows permanently (so it seemed) frozen up on the inside on my way to school in Small Heath, and the hedge and grass 'scorching' in 86 on the fields around Pocklington (relatively little snow that winter away from the east coast fringes so little to blanket and protect the ground. Great times, though I chiefly remember 62-63 for its sheer length and intensity (plus two great blizzards at the end of December and beginning of January) and the longest, heaviest - one and a half foot - continuous snowfall in January 1982 (when I was living in Gloucester) plus the lowest temperature I've ever encountered in that month of minus 15C - about 4 Fahrenheit. Add on Jan 12th 1987, the very cold spells (blizzards east of the Pennines) in 78-79, the polar low of Feb 69, and Feb 91 and I can't ever complain that I haven't experienced some of the best, ie wintriest, weather in my life-time. I am aware of a generation which has no real concept of what those days were like and only hope they will come round again. As yet, despite the GW issues. I see no reason why they can't, though they may become ever rarer.

Many thanks for the welcome pottyprof. I think the idea is worth the risk because, as with volcanic dust, the artificial stuff would gradually disperse. However, I think a UNESCO combined approach, with international approval needed could work out a safe trial shot. My problem with waiting for all nations to reduce emissions in sufficient amounts is that we don't seem to have enough time for that - particularly now that countries like China and India are building coal fired pwer stations like crazy and the search - in the Arctic and Antarctic - for oil is relentless.

Several scientists have suggested 'seeding' the stratosphere with billions of miniature reflectors (eg, foil specks; filaments) to reduce the amount of solar heat entering the earths atmosphere and thus lowering the global temperature. This has either been rubbished as too expensive, or hiding the real issue which is around man-made emissions and planet mis-use. As to the former, yes it would probably be extremely expensive but if the alternative is global economic collapse and mass starvation then I would suggest it's worth it. As to the latter, true it wouldn't address the causes of global warming but it would/could buy much needed time while we eventually bring about greener energy emissions. Am I really off the wall with this understanding of the suggestion or is it something worth going for? Any thoughts?