Scott W wrote:

Excuse my ignorance and weakness of having looked at "The Weather
Outlook" but has anyone heard of the following fact that I read on
TWO...

"Although the days are have now been lengthening for a while, the
weather tends to lag behind by about one month, meaning that on average
the coldest winter in the UK can be expected during the second half of
January and the first half of February."


When I looked into this about forty years ago - damn I feel old - I found
mid-January was roughly the coldest time of the year and mid-July the
warmest.

The figures were based on Northern Hemisphere stations that had mean
temperatures falling near to or below zero for a time. This was to give me
a couple of fixed dates when I'd start calculating warming and freezing
degree days. The dates had to be multiples of 10-day periods as that was
the frequency at which we issued our ice charts. January 21st was the
nearest start of a ten-day period matching the time of minimum temperature.

What made the selection tricky was that many Arctic stations had two minima,
one in December and the other in February, but this may have been due to
the short period of validity of the "normals" for these stations - many
were only for ten years.


--
Graham Davis
Bracknell