This chart is pretty self-explanatory. The Arctic really is beyond exceptionally warm at the moment. Some regions there are 12-15C above average!

WACC! Excellent for negative AO/NAO - long live the extended WACC winter where the PV cannot get established (at least in its usual location).

The cold across Eurasia is particularly noticeable in the chart you posted. A warmish Canadian Artic combined with colder than normal conditions across Eurasia is exactly what our corner of the planet needs if we are to get any taste of proper winter.

Nit-picking, but that map is a forecast for 6-10 days ahead. Maybe conditions at the moment are the same. I don't know.

Mild winter of 07/08, despite the really low solar activity, probably explained by the moderate/strong La Nina of 07/08.

This is a forecast chart through to Nov 7 (10 days away), rather than actual. The warm zone seems to peak in this chart and +14C -ish; then there is a compensatory cold belt from Kamchatka right across the N Eurasian landmass to the Atlantic seaboard, troughing over Siberia at -10-ish. I would say it was a pretty good balance if it wasn't for the positive anomalies forecast over all of N America as well.

In the mean time, an early sign of hope for those looking at the weak/ non existent polar vortex for Nov into December:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/teleconnections.shtml 

I like this bit:

"On its website, the county council says "the gritting routes have been carefully designed to ensure all strategic routes are treated, as well as all major roads to places such as hospitals and schools"."

what they may find, should we get severe weather, is that because they've cut back gritting the more minor roads, their gritting team will struggle to make it into work, meaning the major routes are not in fact gritted properly either. 

It's a great example of how much energy our oceans store. The relative lack of ice is having a big impact on the temperature due to that latent heat energy being released from the exposed ocean surface etc.

Well the snow cover chart is looking pretty impressive as we approach the end of the month. As of 0z yesterday virtually the whole of Russia and a good part of north and east Scandinavia was covered. The southward extent of the snow across Eurasia is also very impressive for the time of year.

http://weather.rap.ucar.edu/surface/snowNESDISnh.gif

GW you mentioned  61/62 as an analogue year.

Just looked back at my own observations for Burton on Trent.

The mean monthly temps I recorded were.

N 4.8,D 1.0,J 3.2,F 4.2,M 2.8

The most interesting feature was a cold spell of  three weeks stretching from Dec 15th to Jan 5th.This included minimum temperatures of -10C on Christmas day,and on the 2nd and 3rd of January.It also included eleven days with maxima of 0C or below.Thre was amoderayte snowfall on the 29th and 30th December with snow lying for a week.

January and February were pretty average but cold north easterlies set in around 22nd Feb leading into one of the coldest Marches on record.with persistent winds between north and south east.There was an absence of heavy snow but the main feature was the cold nights with frost on 23 days.

So will December 2016 deliver a decent cold spell?We await the Meto contingency forecast with interest.

Anyone concerned with " ice that can bare a duck in november" or has that been disproven these days?

Met office update suggests colder and drier than normal over NDJ...

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/mohippo/pdf/public-sector/forecast-temp-ndj-v2.pdf

Drier than normal isn't necessarily 'no snow'.

Many places had an extremely dry December 2010, but got good snow cover lasting anywhere from 5 to 31 days.

A repeat would be loverly!!

wow, when was the last time the MetO produced a "below average temperature" winter outlook?

That's a fairly dramatic update and it would appear the confidence level is relatively high.

Absolutely, a colder than normal outlook will almost always come with the 'drier' tag - simply because cold is likely to suggest less Atlantic based weather than normal. So less precipitation, but not NO precipitation.

After viewing Gavs winter update over the weekend I was concerned that the signal for a more mobile westerly regime may be present in the next GLOSEA5 update, hopefully GLOSEA5 continues with its impressive seasonal projections and is once again proven right.

Pretty unusual to see the MetO going for anything in winter cooler than average these days.

The link shows the most likely NDJ average at about 4.0C and the figure for November on its own at about 6.0C. That being so, they are going for a DJ UK average of just about 3.0C.

That would be the coldest since DJ 2010-11 and definitely puts the odds on some of the white stuff

The update is not a surprise in some ways given some of the comments from Ian F over the last few weeks, however to make that call in the modern era with the QBO now westerly, and many of the global models having switched to an Atlantic driven winter seems a brave one.

How old were your kids when you told them Father Christmas wasn't real?

I do think that these ensemble runs are less than credible - look at how your daily ensembles turn to spaghetti after 12 days. Imagine extending that for 12 weeks.

Still enough for me to go out and check the padlock on the woodshed though.

1.5C!