You don't have an agenda against the MetO though 

Like ballamar I'm keen to see how the ECM op fits in with it's ens.

Well the answer to that is it's not far from the mean IMBY, and there's a definite milder trend in that mean towards the end of the run. I'm not stopping chopping logs for the fire just yet mind.

It's remarkable how often recently the op at T+240 has been much milder than the mean. One does wonder if that can be just chance, or whether its greater resolution has enabled it to pick up something that the other ensemble members have missed.

GFS FI continues to flip about in terms of 850s I see, although the basic pattern is one of more HP around than we've seen for a while.

As you'd expect there's a fun mix of mild south westerlies through to cold north easterlies, and bland nout to see here in between set ups. 

Some of the mildness seems to be coming from set ups where the HP mas migrated and a legacy of milder air is still wandering through, suggesting colder air would follow if the set up persisted long enough.

ECM is chilly or cold until T144 or so when HP establishes to our south and allows a long but not excessively mild west or south westerly to develop. 

All in all a definite sign for the weather to quieten down in deep FI but whether it'll happen or indeed will be cold, average or mild is still very much TBA. More runs needed and all that.

milder interlude! One frost here all winter as we approach the twilight of the season! ...the winter has been VERY mild, the forecasts all pointed to cold...Very poor.  

The thing that stood out about the "BBQ summer" prediction 10 years ago was that they made it public when we were only halfway through April 2009, and still 6 weeks from the start of the meteorogical summer. At the time I thought it was a bold call and was rather unlike the MetO as they were previously normally fairly conservatice with their long-range forecasting and how much of it they made known to the public.

I do think though there is a bit of a difference between issuing a forecast for an entire season several weeks before than season even begins and the situation we are in at the moment. For me, this is very like the output of early-mid last February all over again. Back then, as now, we had the models showing one thing in FI and the MetO predicting the complelte opposite. What I can't remember is how much, if any, support the milder op runs had last February from the ensemble runs at the time, but what I do remember is the number of times that one or two members here predicted that the MetO would drop their forecast for a major cold spell at the end of that month and would revert to something more akin to what the milder GFS and ECM op runs were showing for a while...

you live on the Isle of Wight. You are not exactly representative of the country in general.

There's a Winter Moaning thread, in case you missed it.

He is not moaning though, he is pointing out the reality that the NWP have been pretty useless this winter, getting the big picture wrong time and time again after around t+120 and the UK specifics completely wrong at t+96.

ECM has been the worst of the lot in my opinion - at least the GFS with its multiple outputs and the parallel in addition, gets it right sometimes - could be coincidence though, on the scattergun principle.

In a normal year, the models are a pretty good guide out to t+144 and even to t+192 in our normal zonal setup. But the major SSW which occurred a few weeks ago, has left the models failing, since they are not engineered it appears to cope with abnormal meteorological events.

ECM has been complete crud and here a commentator from another place makes a suggestion as to why:

"We have an interesting stand off developing - EC op and EPS suites that’s have trended away from cold versus the MetO text that hasn’t altered a bit.

I read a really interesting response in another place from a US guru stating that, in his opinion, the extremity of the SSW that reversed winds for over 20 days has actually wrecked the winter forecast so far. Instead of a more predictable SSW with downwelling impacts over the more usual 1-3 weeks we have had such a deep affair (top 3 SSW events was his call) that it has made a mess of the tropical signal and lead to a lot of destructive forcing. It is also his opinion that this is about to end now that the winds have returned to a westerly up top and a more solid and coherent pattern can be established. His research points to a -NAO through February. Lots in his post I want to research."

The ECM mean shows it remaining cold for the rest of this week but maybe something less cold as we move through next week?

The met office remain adamant of a cold February yet ECM and GFS do not back this.

Who's going to be the one with egg on faces...

I think we've unfortunately gone to Def Con 1 with some, and Moaning doesn't quite cover it. #TenaModelOutputThread

....Aaaaand SNIP. Hopefully you can see the dichotomy there.

This is the model thread and is it moaning to point out where the model output has been inconsistent or just plain wrong?

Anyway, I am backing UKMO in their forward analysis for a cold signal - they must be seeing some signals which are eluding the regular NWP output we get to see.

I know some people don't like the ECM ENS SD charts but these are utterly atrocious for extended cold. Things have flipped around recently and I still wouldn't rule out a severe cold in early February. However, I don't think we're anywhere near a 70% chance now.

Since people wanted this. My personal snow risk map for tommorow. This is the probability of seeing any snow and does not necessarily correlate with snow amounts.

I seem to recall a great series of output for mid/late January showing very cold easterlies that fell into the T+144 to T+168 period that I called on this thread as being marginal (along with Ian B as I recall) and not nailed on due to the fine margins involved. It didn't materialise due to that rouge US storm. I equally would call the current output as being in flux - I wouldn't rule out a milder shot early next week, but I also wouldn't rule out a burst of heights into Greenland or a more progressive surge into Scandi following on. 

Just looking at the ECM ens and they're not that far off what GFS is showing from what I can see - day time temps creep up in FI with pressure being noticeably higher than recently. There's a low risk of properly mild weather and a low risk of properly cold with the middle ground being cool to average.

I personally don't think a few days of milder HP weather is a bad thing for a cold spell, as the HP could always move somewhere more favourable and it does signal that the recent pattern of chilly and wet may be coming to its end (albeit not for 7 days or so!).

Of course if we do end up with a nice mild HP, fog issues aside it should feel pleasant down here in the strengthening sun

As a lot of people seem to be in winter is over mode, I think it’s inportant to note that we all enjoy the weather and the majority of us would love to have deep snow every year, but due to the nature of our isles there is never the garentuee, over the last 10 years we have had some fantastic events for wintery weather but we’ve also had some very poor winters too and that’s just how it is, the problem with forecasting spells of cold weather is the uncertainty because really, we just don’t what’s going to happen in 2 weeks time because Mother Nature dictates what’s what. The point is, we know how quickly things can change, and me personally, I’m too much of an optimist to call WIO when we haven’t started feb yet! Winter is over when it’s over.

more likely they wait for definitive evidence and then change the forecast. It’s like a shipping tanker making a turn. But as Brian says this winter is petering out now. Just as well I didn’t invest much effort this year in model watching. It has proved another massive waste of time 

Is that in early February only, or for the whole of February Brain?

Indeed looking at that you would have to say the coming week could well be the coldest we see all winter.