I wouldn’t know, far too long ago hehe

The ECM ensemble mean at T+240 puts the 0c isotherm from the north coast of Brittany to the southern border of Belgium. The Op has it lying from The Wash to southern Wales, where the mean has the -3c isotherm.

As one Met Officer said over here a few years back, it is actually quite scary at how accurate they are. 

You still can't beat a good, old fashioned barometer though. We may scoff at the idea of such today, but we can only imagine how important this simple little device was to people (and especially sea-farers / farmers etc) in the days long before basic mainstream forecasts and NWP output became readily available. 

Those convergence zones gave us a lot of snow last winter

4 days snow cover 28-31 Dec 2020 (max depth 8 cm)

20 days snow cover Jan 2021 (max depth 20 cm)

9 days snow cover Feb 2021 (max depth 27cm)

Be great to have another winter like that!

Yep, the op was one of the milder options for London.

EC46 Still looks good IMO 

Where do you think the meteorological offices get their data to populate the models? There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of data loaded into computer systems every time they are initialised; that includes readings of barometric pressure.

Impressive stats! 

At T+240 London is almost 5c warmer at 850hPa on the Op v the Mean: +2.5 v -2.2. In this set-up that’s almost the difference between rain and sleet/snow, certainly with some elevation.

I know. My point was more to do with the usefulness of the household barometer today (as compared to the past)

I have two. One was a gift from my great grandfather’s estate, which I was given over 55 years ago.  The other was a gift from some French friends of the family, again over 50 years old.  Both are the old-fashioned kind, free of pesky electronics. The French one, of course, has the words in French. It still works, despite Brexit….. 

Yes marginal for south - however Met office have mentioned it will stay below average or rather cold in the south and milder in the north west between 21st and 30th.

A somewhat less cold 12z ECM ens set IMBY. Just one run and all but shows the perils of the projected set up for my neck of the woods quite nicely - the HP needs to be not too far West, robust enough and the jet far enough south for LPs to be pushed through Northern France/the Channel or we end up in milder air with rain. The Op has me average on Xmas day in terms of day time temps and above average at night and Boxing day is above average and wet - the op giveth and it taketh away. Should mention the Op is in the milder group by then and that's still a minority at that stage so hopefully tomorrow's efforts will look more like this morning's 00z Op rather than the 12z. 

Given the trend over the last 2-3 days I'd say IMBY the chances of a proper cold snap or spell are still there but reducing. I guess it's worth noting there's still a fairly decent chance of it being cooler than average up to around the 27th Dec, after which the scatter makes it hard to call.

A quick look for Glasgow on the ECM ens suggests more chance of being in colder air, as you'd expect in the kind of setup the Op shows this evening.

It's an interesting setup I guess but I'd rather have had the low level cold and dry weather that was looking likely a few days ago.

And when the inevitable Brexit blackouts occur, that's when they'll shine once again!

There is something very aesthetic about those old barometers, and the fact that yours are still in fine fettle shows what great quality they are and the incredible craftsmanship that went into them.  

Do you have the link to the EC46 day? Thanks

https://apps.ecmwf.int/webapps/opencharts/products/extended-anomaly-mslp

https://apps.ecmwf.int/webapps/opencharts/products/extended-anomaly-2t

Can you remind me what happened in 1881 please?

Important to note up until this afternoon, there were consistent patterns for the HP to sink back over the UK and never properly attach to Greenland and Iceland

Don’t be surprised if that scenario shows later / tomorrow

Looks like we got a decent cold snap:

https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/twodata/reanalysis.aspx?year=1881&month=Jan&dom=01&var=tmp&region=NA&level=850&hour=00

Nonetheless, people here would still be chuntering about the lack of snow and drip drip drip as the sun gets stronger through January. "If only we'd had this cold snap in December blah blah blah when the days were shorter".

Here's one link anyway:

Weather anomaly in Europe - Forecast - met.hu

On 17 January 1881,[5] a low pressure system rapidly developed in the English Channel. The snowfalls began on the 17th in the southwest and as the system deepened as it moved through the Channel, a gale force easterly developed over southern parts with heavy blizzards and drifting snow. The blizzard paralysed all transport, communication, trade and industries. Hundreds of miles of rail track were blocked by drifting snow, dozens of feet high in places. Even in central London, there were 3 foot drifts in places. Around 100 people are believed to have died as a result of the blizzard. 

 Very true 

December is the warmest winter month so people surely could not moan about if only it was December 🤪🤪

I wonder how much the models flipped in 1881……………..

Looks about right. 

Bloody easterlies. 😂

I would guess it's the same reason that the course of a river is fairly predictable, while the movement of a loose hosepipe is unpredictable and chaotic. The looping jet is much harder to model than a straight one.