In reply to - Best summing up in easily understandable terms that Ive seen comes from Michael Hilton @ www.buxtonweather.co.uk
"Strolled past the newstands in Morrison's twice in the last week - on both occasions national redtop newspapers were headlining dire warnings about how "the coming winter will be long, hard and far colder than usual", and "snow expected soon" and "100 days of severe winter to come".
The only problem is that there is not a shred of evidence for any of this - but it does sell newspapers doesn't it!!
These predictions do not come from the Met Office or other legitimate forecasters. In fact, most genuine seasonal forecasting organisations in Britain show the exact opposite outlook this winter — a generally milder season thanks to lower pressure than normal in the Atlantic around Iceland and higher pressure than usual around the Azores, a pattern that generally drives mild Atlantic winds over the UK and much of Europe, although with more wind and rain.
It is worth emphasising that these outlooks only ever give an average picture over December, January and February. They also give only a rough idea of what the average weather patterns will be like for much of the time, so there can still be cold spells and snow between milder runs of weather. That means, for example, a place that usually gets 20 snow days may get just 10. There is one big unknown in these winter outlooks — they cannot make seasonal predictions of sudden and dramatic convulsions in the stratosphere. This is a phenomenon called sudden stratospheric warming, when the temperature of the stratosphere over the North Pole suddenly shoots up.
Weeks later that upheaval can sometimes feed down into the lower atmosphere and can turn our weather bitterly cold, as happened in the tremendous freeze and huge snowfalls at the end of 2010 - and had a hand in "The Beast from the East in early 2018."
Post edited at 09:26
