It's been a little wet and windy up here, in this part of the UK. Hopefully it will spread to all that need it, eventually.

Jiries - see my post in the unusual weather thread for a first hand account of recent Cyprus weather 🙂

Perhaps we'll get a wet and windy winter instead.

isn't the correlation for a stormy late autumn/early winter?

The difficulty is that there aren’t many examples of major El Niños, and this one looks like being record-breaking; on top, of course, of underlying climate change.   Don’t forget Brian’s post of a year or two back showing the multi-decadal trend for a rise of pressure to the south of us. Does a huge release of additional heat work to boost the high pressure belt perhaps?  I think we’re between uncharted waters and guesswork, to be honest.

Indeed it is now or so it now seems from reading the various Oracles.

But back in August, I recall kickoff would start in September. At least from some of the pundits. And big time too. Flash floods the lot.

And there were several experts suggesting this. 

But there was no firm consensus as to the timing back then.

The shortage of Atlantic hurricanes, well predicted I think, seems to have changed the playing field.

So far, the lows seem to run north towards Iceland, watering Western Scotland and Ireland. Why?

Slightly off topic, the fine drizzle that's been falling here in South Dorset today shows as 9mm in my gauge. Far more than I expected.

No danger now of flash flooding from parched land but a long way to go before I'm sated.

Yeh, its about as early as I've seen snow (to low levels) in the UK and its a plausible setup; in fact this particular pattern seems to appear more in late october than late december.

The 2008 event will take some beating. 

We have had snow here as early as the first few days of October and a decent covering in mid month since I have lived here, so it is possible much earlier than the date shown. Although for context I’m not seeing much evidence of October snow in the output currently.