To my eye, that looks rather like some snow candy for Western Europe and the UK.

Thats the chart I was refering to. Cheers.

Cool and wet on this run with wintriness especially for northern hills. Milder towards the SW, colder NE. dipping jet aligned NW-SE.

Not forgetting that the Azores high is still only about 2,000 miles away. Surprised you didn't highlight that.

very good news from GP 

New EC update weeks 3 and 4 as you were. High pressure in all the right places.

should be here soon

http://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/applications/monthly-forecast/

Plus the pattern is already @144 on the Euros..

http://www.meteociel.fr/modeles/gefs_cartes.php?ech=6&code=21&mode=0&carte=1 

East coast looks primed fab

http://www.meteociel.fr/cartes_obs/gens_panel.php?modele=0&mode=0&ech=192

Yes looking very good for the NE- also Scotland E

indeed some  like this ohh please babe

I’m again left wondering when the GFS OP will latch on properly because almost every run is like waiting for milk to curdle at the moment. The GFSP fan club can’t even roll that out these last two runs.

Cross model at 120hrs. We are a long way off that.

I think it's a pretty safe bet to now say that the second half of January will be the coldest spell of the winter so far. At the moment the period from 18th-23rd is actually looking the coldest. Nevertheless there is quite a bit of cherry picking of charts going on and some rather fanciful predictions of snowfall in specific regions at the end of January! But we always get that.

Perhaps unusually for recent winters there might be some colder than usual polar maritime incursions from the NW. There is also some spells of flabby low pressure over us which can produce some quite severe cold but may also let the  Azores HP ridge back towards us. Also to be noted is that the 850's on this current set (18z) ensembles are not much different to ours for places like Warsaw and Frankfurt. So perhaps we will have to look north and not to the East for some time yet.

I have been wondering that for the past week - whilst there has been some runs that denote cold zonality like what we had in Jan of 2018 and transient NW ly winds as well as slider lows there is STILL no evidence of any HLB despite Met office / BBC and many other model output forecast including longer range outlook forecast which go for cold or clearly show blocked set up's the the GFS is struggling with it!? How come? - People can't keep telling me it's too early surely? as GFS now goes out to 26th?

Meanwhile nice to see some real Sub -10 @ 850 hpa freezer of some ensembles on the 18z run, although majority are still around -5 @ 850hpa:

Some FI charts from the 18z run:

Yet again - a southerly tracking low allowing pressure to build to our north and north east as Azores HP finally retrogresses to shake hands with the E Canadian HP & GREENLAND HP:

Good morning to the 0z run; look at the mean, and the lack of spread, in the GFS ENS around 21st - 10 days away, but the clustering between -5 and -10 I would say is relatively unusual at that range.

https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/twodata/chart.aspx?chart=/charts/gefs/gefsens850london0.png?cb=541

The 00z GFS has variations on the same theme. Some deep cold in FI but even this gets pushed into Europe with NW-SE escalator.

Plenty of nice GEFS out there this morning

Martin

Those first few words are exactly what I was going to say Doc, added with excellent e46 update and a new high of snow rows on GFS ens, all is well 

Sorry, how can you say that? A couple of rogue mild runs dragging the mean around the 23rd higher, but apart from that mean of -5 or below all the way to the end with a new high of snow rows!!

Rather uninspiring model output last night and this morning. Hopefully GFS is not picking up a new trend to short cold blip that never really reaches the south.

Still no sign of any meaningful northern blocking, and whatever it looks like on the charts we know that “cold zonality” doesn’t cut it in the SE so from a NIMBY perspective I’m starting to lose patience with this month. 

The snow rows might look high but if it’s from westerlies it won’t be snow down here in reality. 

Colder than we've been used to, but all the interesting stuff is still FI. Keep watching, but keep your powder dry.

Well those are cold ensembles but the actual synoptics are messy.

Snow could easily occur in the south on frontal boundaries and other features but it's not ideal for the south as it's a very messy picture.

The north could do well though, especially at height.