What's influencing me is whilst Feb through to August this year have been much above average temperature wise, Sept and Oct have been much closer to average, contrasting with recent years of early Autumn being well above average. Whilst November first half was extremely mild, we then had a much colder period, including the lowest Nov temps for 15 years

On balance I'm going for winter to be around average overall temps wise, but an "old style" average. I think there will be plenty of mild or even very mild spells, but also a couple of separate cold weeks. I would not be surprised if we see a very cold, even severe, cold spell, probably either between Christmas and New Year (aka 1995-6) or the first few days in January, with potentially some heavy snow

Probably be hopelessly wrong, but it's all good fun!

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/business/public-sector/civil-contingency/3moutlook_djf_v2.pdf 

Obvs whatever signals there were for higher than usual chance for cold have now evaporated. 

Based on this, is the update good news? 😇

I think it did reasonably ok. That said, I don't attach any significance to one forecast either way.

Not really. I do not want that!

I think long range forecasting is still very much in its infancy and subject to so many as yet unknown (and potentially always unknown) factors that for the foreseeable future their level of verification will remain very low. I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

Yep, far too many unknowns

One of the things that stands out to me is that they don't seem to have any stats for days of snow falling from 91-20 - both there, and on the BBC article mentioned the other day, they stop at 81-10. Odd, frankly!

The video does of course tally with lived experiences down here, but I do wish they'd go into a "deep dive" about why we no longer get midwinter easterlies. That's a big reason the number of days of snow falling, and indeed the number of days with 10/20cm of snow have fallen away so sharply here since the 80s.

If I were a youngster again, fresh out of school and raring to go to Uni, I'd have been tempted to study meteorology (instead of CompSci as I did) and perhaps do some formal research into it all!

I've flagged this to Marco Petagna:

https://x.com/TWOweather/status/1995773541212410299 

Thank you Brian and Darren. Whilst perhaps not the million $ question, it's perhaps not far off.

If you do get a reply and a deep dive could you please provide the link? Thank you.

Nick.

Because the atmospheric conditions for such are no more.

For cold easterlies you need a cold Arctic and a cold continent - that just doesn't happen like it did and that is because of background anthropogenic warming and that continents/poles warm faster than oceans.

We do see continental highs (its been semi persistent there over recent months - hardly any lows get east of the UK in Europe anymore) but this high is too far south and instead of easterlies there are SE>SWlies pumping warmth N/NE

Will we see a spell of cold easterlies this  month? I very much doubt it, because of the new fundamentals I've mentioned.

That's a good point. I don't know if it's true to say "hardly any", but it seems like fewer do.

Classic example this month. It was looking promissing for cold and snow over Alps and central Europe but then everything shifted further noth and the high in the south keeping things quite.

I thought it was just due to the strong and stable polar vortex which kept lows further north so the jet is more zonal. The warming of the Arctic seems to have reduced the atmospheric push to break the jet and form blocks then again so many "rare" things need to be in place now before we get the blocking Retron referred to earlier.

Was there some talk of polar vortex being more unstable which could couse the jet to buckle and spill some staff down to us?

Dec 2nd. Could be mistaken for a 'modern' winter set up. 

2 days later, the Arctic gates seemed to just open. 

By the 10th, pretty much all of northern Europe under the snowy freezer. 

So anything can happen at a momemts notice I guess, but what seems to be a factor in the '81 case at least, is that there was little upper warmth over (continental) Europe, so not much for that typical Atlantic high to grab onto, opting insteat for follow the warm plume that was went up towards southern Greenland. 

That's a good point. We have had one or two "where did that Easterly come from" threads in years gone by. They showed how cold Easterlies sometimes appeared at fairly short notice. Admittedly, as mentioned above, we can't really expect Easterlies any more, although I'm sure that one will come along eventually. However, I think that the principle applies to Northerlies too and I expect that you could probably do a "where did that Northerly come from" too. 

If you look at the GFS ensembles, you'll see a couple of cold scenarios in the far reaches of mid December.

https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/twodata/gefs.aspx?run=na&lg=850&lglocation=london&charthour=006&chartname=ps_500hpa&chartregion=na-region&p=1&charttag=PS%20500hPa%20 (GPDM)

They're outliers, of course. But they could happen. And if they do, we'll probably be scratching our heads about where they came from. 

A month or so ago my wife floated the suggestion of going to the Alps in December. I said it wasn't worth the risk and I'm glad that's what I said. 😊

And yet on the other side of the Atlantic, time and time again they get deep cold outbreaks right down to the Gulf coast.

I had a look at the CEDA Met Office Catalogue to see if such a dataset exists and it seems they did stop recording this (at least for Public consumption) in 2010.  Based on the definition of a UK White Christmas as one snowflake being spotted at Aberdeen Weather Centre, perhaps it was felt that this was not a useful set of stats !

Anyway, they have been recorded "Days with snow lying" since 1972 and this is an ongoing dataset currently up to 2024.

The data is in netcdf format (.nc) but can be converted to Excel with various apps. I had a look at the number of days of snow lying per year from 1972-2001 (earliest 30 years) and compared it with 2015-2024 being the most recent 10 years and the differences are shown below.

For a large part of the south of the UK except for highland areas, it would seem that even in this quite short timescale, the number of days of lying snow has decreased from about 7-8 days per year down to about 2-3

I do it every year and its never been a problem but my resorts is at 1850m (village level). Always had between 60 - 80cm in the resort which is enough to tick the boxes.

My advice if you want to go lower is to book later on in the season and at short notice. You will get away with it in Austria but still its risky. But then again some people are different and for instance my friend does not care whether there is snow in the village or not. I am different.

1600m altitude is the min I would consider.

That's some good-quality sleuthing there! 😁And yes, the charts you've produced paint the picture well, a marked decrease for most of us, and something which I daresay most of us have seen firsthand... I know I have!

One of the things I'd note is that snow on the ground, here at least, has become very much hit or miss. Most years see zero (as in a complete cover at 9 AM, which is the definition I use for a day of snow lying), but when we do manage to get a cover it usually hangs around for a while.

I've been keeping detailed records since 2009, and the days of snow lying for here is:

2020/21 - 7

2017/18 - 5

2012/13 - 6

2011/12 - 3

2010/11 - 10 (the last time there was snow on the ground in November)

2009/10 - 18

There were more days with partial dustings, and the odd day of a dusting on all surfaces which only lasted for 30 minutes (as happened at midnight one day in January this year), but they don't count.

Take the average of the last 10 winters and you'd get 1.2 days/year - but that hides the fact we've only had two decent snow events in the past decade!

I reformatted the 2 charts above into 1 showing the % reduction in lying snow average 2015-2024 compared to the 1972-2001 average (below)

On that way of showing the change it is clear the the Eastern side of the UK has seen a much greater reduction than the west by and large. 

It bears out what you said earlier that whereas we got a lot of snow cover from E or NE winds from the Scandi high blowing in copious amounts of snow to the east and south-east we now see that the reduced amounts now come from NW winds into the western districts of the UK

Not like they did in the past, sadly.

Cf. the state of sea ice in Hudson bay and off Baffin Island (and fwiw, further away in the Barents and Kara seas).