"Tudor Hughes" wrote;

Isn't the mean flow anomaly a little misleading, at least
to someone unversed in these matters? The monthly flow was mainly
SW'ly but with a week of northerlies, to put it rather simply, and
there was very little in between. It's true that the mean flow is as
stated and it is quite in order to make correlations with temperature
and rainfall but it doesn't quite give the flavour of the month, if
you'll excuse the phrase.

Weeeeeeell ..... you get the flavour of the month in the
Monthly Review at http://www.climate-uk.com/monthly/0701.htm
which starts off: "The very unsettled southwesterly type which set
in just before the New Year lasted without interruption until the
20th. This was followed by a brief northerly outbreak, but rising
pressure led to the establishment of an anticyclone close to
southwestern Britain from the 26th onwards." So it was all there
if you had wanted to follow the links.

The beauty of the monthly synoptic overview is that it's
a pretty-much objective assessment. The description of
January as having a northwesterly anomalous flow is
entirely consistent - of course - with the sequence of events
that we had. I accept your point, though, about the "unversed".

OK, so these overviews are constricted by that human
invention, the *month*, but I do occasional post links
to a chart of running W-ly, S-ly and Cy indices to show
where (or, rather, when) the peaks, troughs, and
turning-points are. And I try to answer people's questions.
If there's anything else you'd like, feel free to ask ... I can
only say no.

Philip