Retron: I don't doubt your figures for a second.
But if there were hotspots such as yours on the Kent coast, it just goes to show how incredibly cold the bulk of the country must have been to record such a low final average for the month.
My gripe is that the bulk of the country seems to have erased that experience from its collective consciousness. It's now taken as read that UK winters have been rubbish for 35 years, and will be for evermore. Every episode of wintriness, or month of record-breaking national cold, is just dismissed as merely localized or the wrong kind of snow.
I've not! One of the most remarkable spells of winter I can remember.
However, for much of it, I was panicking we wouldn't get snow here. We had experienced heavy snow in late Nov - but that was on a day out to York. IMBY it had been Baltic but bone dry (save some freezing fog and the odd rime), and potential PPN bands for here that appeared in models were downgraded by the day itself. When one was modelled for Friday 17th, I kept everything crossed, and it delivered in spades. Could enjoy it better and relax once everywhere was white.
I'd actually put the preceding winter as No1 of the decade, though. A less intense and shorter lived cold spell in the December at least gave us a good covering of snow on the ground for Xmas, then a thaw from Boxing Day, before winter returned, bringing the deepest snow here I can remember (a couple in my childhood may have been deeper, but I never measured back then) that lasted on the ground almost a month.
We had a very snowy Jan & Mar 2013, too (although all were within short-lived cold snaps). In fact, all falls since (we've had at least a half a cm covering every? subsequent winter) have been in frustratingly brief snaps, barring the BftE spell in 2018, and that was annoyingly dry here, with just a couple of 1cm falls, and it wasn't that even cold in this region.
Martin
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