Thank God we're at the winter solstice! There is nothing I hate more in winter than that horrible 16:00 darkness, made worse when you get days on end of overcast muck, like today. It's just so draining and depressing, and I wonder how the Finns or the Icelandics must cope with it. At least every day now brings an improvement, if very slow at first.
I'm very much in the opposite camp in that regard because I actually get more depressed during the summer months if we are getting constant grey skies (as we tend to get here) at the very time of the year when we should be getting more in the way of sunshine. At this time of year though, that doesn't matter so much because it's dark for most of the time anyway which means that I don't get to see as much of those depressing grey skies during the day.
My biggest gripe with those constant grey skies comes from the fact that the temperatures then as a result, refuse to drop and that has certainly been an important factor during this winter so far. Today was our coldest day of the winter so far at Edinburgh Gogarbank with a maximum temperature of 2.6°C, but that is only 0.3°C below the officially recorded minimum temperature as at 6am this morning.
From that, it is easy to see what has been ruining this winter for us so far because this constant lack of any real diurnal temperature range even whilst we have been under high pressure just sums up how boring and uninteresting our weather here in Edinburgh generally is.
During this winter so far, our daytime maximum temperatures have generally been OK. We did recently get a few days of double figures temperatures, but that has been our only really mild spell of this winter so far and thankfully, that was only fairly brief. In fact, our daytime maximum temperatures at Edinburgh Gogarbank are actually running slightly below the newly released 1991-2020 average for that particular station (those new averages were only just realeased last week by the Met Office).
In the same way that one of the factors which make up a decent summer is that it should warmer than average overall, the opposite of that is true at this time of the year so that one of the factors which makes up a "decent" winter is that it should be colder than average. That is why we are doing OK as far as daytime maximum temperatures are concerned.
However, it is a completely different story when it comes to our overnight minimum temperatures because at the moment, the overnight minimum temperatures at Edinburgh Gogarbank is running almost 2°C above even those 1991-2020 averages which I have just mentioned. The result of this is that our average temperatures are currently running at almost 1°C above average at that same station.
The end result of this is that we have had only 3 air frosts during the whole of this month so far at Edinburgh Gogarbank which is absolutely pathetic for a winter month, not to mention that we still haven't had any lying snow during this winter so far.
However, this is what happens when the temperatures at night in particular, just keep on refusing to drop and that is something which has beeing going on here ever since the start of the autumn. Even tonight, the temperatures under overcast skies are still refusing to drop here even though the temperatures are forecast to get down to around -10°C in some places and because of that, it wouldn't surprise me if I woke up to yet another frost-free horror show tomorrow morning.
The north of Edinburgh, usually always missing out on snow events which occur not just within the rest of Scotland or the UK, but also within the rest of Edinburgh.