Looking back on this winter, it is hard to believe now that it actually all started on such a promising note with those ice days during December. That was a month when we did very well for air frosts and to date, it has been our only colder than average month of this winter.
The only downside of that month was that the cold weather wasn't able to hold on all the way to Christmas, and the fact that there wasn't a lot of snow around. What little snow which we had then though, went on to last for quite a long time.
Sadly though, that was as good as what this winter would get. In January, we still managed to get an average number of air frosts but that was now a slightly milder than average month which was then to set the trend for how the rest of this winter would go. Even then though, we still managed to get a little bit of snow which actually lasted for a while, but there hasn't really been anything on that front since then.
That then takes us to this to this month which has been an absolute disaster in terms of it actually being a "winter" month. We are now roughly two thirds of the way through this very short month and yet, we have only had two air frosts all month. Those came on back to back nights and amount to less than a quarter of our 1991-2020 February average and even less than what we get in a lot of years as far on into those years as April and sometimes even May.
Yet, the beginning of this month in particular is part of what should be the winter equivalent of high summer (for the same reasons that the beginning of August is normally seen as a part of high summer itself) and should therefore, be a part of our coldest period of the year as a result. Furthermore, it has also been a completely snowless month here up until now and it has also been quite a lot milder than average.
Indeed, the manner in which this so-called "winter" has gone on to completely fall apart in this fashion has been so incredible that it has already made those December ice days seem like nothing more than just another distant memory. At the same time, this month has still been very bleak despite the increasing length of daylight at this time of the year.
We were lucky enough to get a sunnier than average month during January but about two thirds into this month, we have only had less than a third of our 1991-2020 February average sunshine amounts so unless we suddenly start to get a lot more sunshine during the rest of this month, this month is clearly on course to end up being substantially duller than average here.
Due to the increasing amount of daylight at this time of the year, it is during this month that we should be getting our sunniest days of the winter and yet this month has been so dull up until now, that this just hasn't even happened up until now.
Finally and unlike in other months, it has actually been a bit wetter here than in other parts of the UK, especially during the last few days. In spite of that though, our rainfall totals continue to quite a lot lower than what the should be.
When you add all of that together along with the fact that there still hasn't been a single named storm which has been named under the joint British/Irish/Dutch system for naming these storms (it was the Danes who named Storm Otto and that is under a different system), this probably has to go down as one of our most boring and uninteresting winters on record in terms of our weather.
That is something which just seems to have got even more apparent as the winter has gone on (the fact that we had that cold start to the winter shows that it was actually quite interesting to begin with, but even that has now faded into just another distant memory). Because of that, I will be more than glad now to see the back of this winter altogether, and to at least see what the coming spring might have in store for us.
Edited by user
19 February 2023 17:44:20
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Reason: Not specified
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.