Yes this moaning thread will be popular and soon!

Don't worry, this thread will probably only have a few more weeks left to run anyway before we move onto the Spring moaning thread which will be starting on this forum in at that time.

When I started last year's spring moaning thread, there wasn't too much enthusiasm for that to begin with as we were in the middle of those Beast from the East events back then with the last winter moaning thread being extended into the first few weeks of last spring as a result.

Looking at the latest model output though, I don't see any repeat of those Beast from the Events happening at that time this year, and I have a gut feeling that we might even get an early spring this year, possibly even starting in a week or so's time (that is based on the fact that the models are pointing towards a build of high pressure for that time, which is combined with mild temperatures). If that happens,

I think that the demand for the spring moaning thread to be started will begin a bit sooner than the last time as a result if that model output ends up being correct, to the point where there might even be a few calls for that to be started rather early this time.

To think we should be up to our knees in snow now if the MetO MRF had been anything near correct, not that I blame them, it was all looking will I good.

Whatever happened to the downwelling anyway?

I wonder if we had all this SSW, MJO, NAO etc etc nonsense back in the 60,s? Back then all we had to worry about was the ABC (always bloody cold)!

Andy

The pitiful lack of snow is not the worse aspect of this woeful and pathetic winter. The vile, disgusting and depressing weekends are 

Yet again after being fine all week, apart from yesterday, I have woken up to another totally crap grey Saturday like I have done every weekend since mid-November, apart from last week. It's beyond ridiculous and the wretched grey skies are not even the worst feature of this awful Saturday it is the repellent, pointless and horrible cold, nasty wind

Simply intolerable especially now the sun is gaining in height and strength. Sick to death of being cooped up indoors. Last Saturday was one of the few days I was actually able to enjoy myself in the past three months of near unrelenting misery. Although as usual these days I had to go out to Deeside to see a decent amount of snow under the crisp blue skies 

In the eighties we had Bill Foggit with his nightly forecast on Yorkshire TV.  He told it from nature, was pretty good at forecasting and was much more entertaining than looking at charts!  

The season of banal weather has, we can now conclude, begun early this year.

Temps between about 4c and 20c are utterly boring and preclude the only weather worth having - snow or warm & sunny.

I hate spring. 

It also means I have to start cutting the bloody lawn again (although I'm going artificial for the back garden this year)

You'll have to wash and brush it instead and if a bird/dog or God forbid a cat decides to poo/wee/vomit on it it won't wash away easily.

It can also get hot unless you get a lawn chiller.

"Err Mrs Snow I just going out to wash and cool the lawn..."

http://www.artificialgrassinc.com/products/cool-turf/

You hate spring, seriously??

Spring is my favourite season. All the hope, all the promise of warmer times to come after the cold of winter. The lengthening days, the warmth of the sun on your face. The garden coming back to life, new shoots, leaves, spring flowers. It's like the whole world is waking up again. Wonderful time of year!

Nah, path and decking enough for table/loungers/hammocks and sow in wild flowers in the remaining grass and just strim it twice a year

Why give over so much of your valuable time to a boring monoculture that only looks good for a couple of days after cutting anyway?

And spring? Jeepers man! where will we ever get our storms if not over spring??? ( well here at least!)

Not forgetting all of the hope for the glorious 6 weeks that summer may bring...... and light nights...... and the first 'T' shirt/shorts/sandals days!

Yeah, always hated it. Invariably damp and mild. Invariably a time to reflect on another rubbish winter.

I love good summer weather - hot, sunny, bone dry for ideally weeks. Love good winter weather - cold, lots of snow causing chaos. Course, the ideal is rare, but it's achievable. 

And I don't know what it is about autumn,  but it's my favourite season. The sense of nature winding down. The low mists. The nights drawing in. The cosiness. Xmas just around the corner. The promise of a once-in-a-generation winter.

We've got a 6 month old dog that poos on the lawn anyway and I wager it's easier to clean up on artificial than the bare earth/grass patchwork that my lawn is. I reseeded 2 years ago and it's as bad as ever. I've got several tress on the circumference of the garden and there are parts in 80%+ shade so it's understandable. And two girls who love tumbling on tumble mats/track with their friends. Not to mention a big trampoline. 

Artificial makes sense.

In full agreement. March and April, in particular, tend to be the most boring months weatherwise of the year. Having said that though, May is one of my favorite months. Nature begins to spring into life and that numbing chill of the previous two months (which curiously feels more unpleasant than actual winter chills) has gone. 

You really said Decking Gray Wolf?

Someone laid decking in the back garden where we now live and it had to come up pronto. Rats. 

Spring and it began yesterday (because we had sea fog), in this part of Dorset can only mean one thing this close to the coast. Fog.

Thick, damp, cold and grey. It's much worse on the East Coast according to my sister in law.

Aberdeen is the place though for proper sea fog. April to September is the time apparently and you'll haar soon enough when it strikes.  From September to March it's an almost continuous thick, grey, filthy, vile blanket according to anecdotal reports with just the occasional glimpse of the sun, though strangely the sun makes an occasional fleeting appearance from Monday to Friday. Saturday and Sunday surely some mistake with the name, has a priority reservation for haar or thick cloud. And invariably a horrible wind usually from an easterly direction. Never cold which is a blessing I suppose. Enough.

But it can't be all that bad because in 2015, Mercer named Aberdeen the 57th most liveable city in the world, as well as the fourth most liveable city in Britain. There was only one person who disagreed. An incredible statistic.

{Sorry Saint this is the moaning thread}

I'm the opposite. Autumn is my least favourite season, I don't hate it but it seems such a 'nothing' type season. Just wet and windy, normally too late for summer heat yet too early for winter snow and cold.

Ranking the seasons from best to worst would be: spring, summer, [quite a big gap here!] winter, autumn.

I guess you enjoy autumn as a precursor to a possible memorable winter and I enjoy spring in the same way looking forward to a good summer.

Damp dismal day again.  would rather have frost or snow.

It's been an 'FI' winter without a doubt, we've seen them before of course in the last 15 or so years of NWP watching.

If we assume that our winter patterns  haven't changed markedly in the last 30 years, then the teleconnections debate and the multiple factors involved really is intriguing especially if you remember the winters prior to 1988.

We've been told this year that everything is place for HLB but at various points the downwelling of the QBO has gone against us, the MJO, events in the Indian Ocean - just one factor hasn't fallen into place. But back then years ago did ALL of these factors keep falling into place again and again ? I just don't get it.

It could be a case of "the more you think you know, the less you actually know". I remember the old days when snow on the ground was a commonplace thing, along with midwinter easterlies dragging in deep cold 850s  (which have all but gone extinct - last year's came of course at the arse-end of winter and involved record-breakingly low thicknesses for the time of year - quite possibly a once-in-a-lifetime event).

One thing which I remember was that there was quite often a lot of confidence in the forecasts. For example, Philip Eden's forecast in the Today newspaper back in the 90s: "Cold high H will sink south over Scandinavia, bringing bitter easterlies and snow". It sure did, a few days later! Or our local forecaster on TVS, saying there'd be enough snow for a snowball fight in a few days' time - there was enough for a snowman, let alone snowballs.

There was no waffle about the MJO, QBO, NAO, AO or whatever - all of which are just another way of looking at the traditional pressure charts, reflecting different setups or patterns which often (but not always) evolve the same way. (They do, however, provide an avenue for some folks to try and look clever).

The research into SSWs is about the only really important new discovery in the last couple of decades, I'd argue, and I'd say that when one comes along it does tend to roll the dice on the hemispheric setup. Sometimes we win (last year), sometimes we lose and others gain instead (this year).

Ah well - another snowless winter down here draws to a boring end. There may be some snow to come into spring, who knows, but it's largely pointless down here as it'll be gone before you know it. The only times in my 39-year lifetime it hasn't were in 1986 (which had lots of snow on the ground throughout February) and last year (which, as mentioned, saw the lowest thicknesses since records began, back in the 40s).

I would love to see another 80s-style deep cold midwinter easterly, or even a classic white Christmas with snow falling and settling - but the former hasn't happened for decades, while the latter's never happened in my lifetime. I do wonder, sometimes, whether I'll ever see either of those before I shuffle off this mortal coil! And no, driving or going on holiday to see it doesn't count.

IMO, March and April can actually be some of the most interesting months of the year, given the variety they can bring. You can go from cold and snow to early summer warmth in the space of a few days, with all of the sunshine and showers in between.

Agree about May though. I love it!

That’s the crux of it. We keep being told that cli... sorry, various modern factors will lead to more extreme weather conditions, and yet while America sees record-breaking freezes and swings in temperature, and southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Japan seem to get deep dumps of snow and heatwaves on a regular basis, we in the UK seem to get perpetual nothingness with no extremes either way. 

That's simply isn't true we have had plenty of extremes for our climate mostly warm ones. But December 10 and March 13 being the exception.  It's just our climate is very benign so real extremes are difficult to achieve. 

Just in the last 20 years or so we've had warmest CET records for April, July, August, September,  October, November,  December.  Spring, Autumn and the second warmest Winter. These records go back 350 years so this is remarkable warming.

One thing which has changed though, is the fact that we have a distinct lack of rainfall in these parts these days which never used to be the case before and I am finding that rather worrying. Of course, we in the east of Scotland have always been one of the driest parts of the UK on average anyway with the west of Scotland being much wetter, but I have never seen a situation before where that west-east difference in the rainfall totals has been as extreme as what it has become these days with those of us in the east, seeing so little in the way of rainfall.

As far as I know, there has been one recent report on climate change (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I am wrong) which suggests that although most of the UK would end up getting wetter overall as a result of climate change, some parts of the UK would end up actually getting drier although in those reports, it was really just NE Scotland (around Aberdeen) where that would be likely to happen. From what I am observing, it would appear as though what was predicted to happen in those reports is actually coming to fruition (there are after all, some members of this forum who have been complaining about there being too much rain in their area recently, especially amongst those who like in the west of the UK) with the very important difference being that the area which was predicted to become drier, has ended up extending much further across the east of Scotland than what had been predicted (hence the reason, why it's so dry here these days).

Crocuses just coming into flower, daffs should follow in a few days

Isn't it time to close this thread and open the spring moaning thread? 

Completely agree with this. What I call the ‘blandification’ of the climate. Extremes are being squeezed at all ends and we just end up with bland nothingness all the time. Worst era for a weather enthusiast in at least the past 160 years.

Just one of many examples that illustrate this point is that the highest mean temperature for January during this past decade here was the lowest of any decade since the 1870s yet we have seen only two Janauries in 15 years that have exceeded 5cm of snowfall. We are just not seeing the extremes at either end. Used to be common for the temperature to reach 15C on a winter day only to see a heavy snowfall just days later. One such example in February 1995 when NE Scotland recorded both the highest and lowest temperatures in the UK within three days (+15C at Dyce and -15C at Keith). Those extreme switch-arounds no longer happen.

The 90s saw few snowfalls but when they occurred they packed a punch and I can remember most of them. None of the pathetic embarrassing 1-2cm dustings that we see time after time in this pitiful era. I forget them all as soon as they are over.

Looking through these set of pictures on the local paper of heavy snowfalls in the past just highlights how bland, benign and totally uninteresting our weather has become in this century. Even bad years for snow like 1975 and 1992 are featured. I imagine the 1992 snowfall was Wednesday 16th December which was a shortlived but heavy fall of snow. The equivalent now would leave grass poking through and be no use to man nor beast.

https://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/fp/the-aberdonian/video-archive-images-of-previous-heavy-snowfalls-in-the-north-east/ (need to skip the first two galleries on Great Northern Road and Salmon Fishing to get to the snow scenes).

The anticyclonic mild crap that we are about to have to endure on top of the endless dross of this non-winter is truly excruciating. Almost certain now we will get to almost seven years without a 10cm fall – so far beyond anything ever seen before it’s incredulous. All the worse that this winter has been so unspeakably dire it has failed to even produce 5cm 

Not just snow we are seeing a lack of but heat – this decade’s maximum temperature is the lowest since at least the 1940s and heavy intense rainfall seems on the decline too - we’re closing in on a year without a single day recording 20mm of rain which is astonishing. It was notable how few days of thunder there was during the recent very wet summers compared to those of the 1950s and the considerably lower sunshine hours indicating more persistent frontal rain as opposed to heavy convective downpours. Convective activity in Spring has decreased as well which is why we haven’t had a wetter than average spring since 2006 which is extraordinary.

All adds up to the most boring era for weather in recorded history