The most notable things about this winter is that we have done fairly well for snow and we did even manage to experience minus double figures temperatures on one occasion, for only the first time since December 2010 at Edinburgh Gogarbank (although that latter feat wasn't actually achieved across all three of my local stations as the temperature at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh failed to reach that threshold). Whilst those individual weather events do play a part in determining what this winter has turned out, it is on how everything averages out over the winter as a whole, that this winter will be judged, rather than on those individual events.
Brian correctly stated that the winter panned out differently further north than how it did where he was, and even very carefully managed to avoid falling into the trap of saying that this was the case in every single aspect. I know that Brian has probably far too much experience in his field to allow himself to fall into such a trap, but a large part of that will no doubt come down to the fact the he at least managed to get an ice day where he was (albeit, just the one over the whole winter) whereas up here in Edinburgh, we didn't even manage to get one single ice day during the entire winter which is something which will continue to lose this winter a number of marks in my opinion.
Of course, any winter has to be colder than average overall, to have a chance of even getting pass marks in my books. As it stands, the temperature at Edinburgh Gogarbank looks set to end up being slightly below average, so this winter has just managed to squeeze through by the skin of its teeth in that regard. However, this has been a winter where January will go down as its only colder than average month. December was a milder than average month here and despite the very cold start to this month, February is now looking set to also go down as being slightly milder than average.
This means that two out of the three winter months will go down as being milder than average which is enough for it to lose marks as a result. This is a month which would probably have been substantially colder than average here, had it all not gone so horribly wrong during the second half of this month which has just been one massive frost-free horror show with not even a single ground frost being recorded during that time, let alone an air frost.
The number of air frosts was very poor during December and after a decent first half of this month, the number of air frosts during this month has also fallen well below the 1981-2010 February average for here, with January being the only month during this winter to have registered an above average number of air frosts. This means that over the winter as a whole, the number of air frosts in this part of the world is actually slightly below average.
Even that is better than recent winters in that regard, but this winter will still go down as a failure in that regard as the number of air frosts has to be above average for this winter to get pass marks for that. Adding all of that together, this has been a winter which has been a lot better than other recent winters, but is also a winter which doesn't deserve to get anything better than pass marks for those reasons which I have mentioned, so I am only going to give it a score of 5/10.
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.