In article ,
Phil Layton writes:
Well I'm just starting to wind down. Most normal business this week binned
at the airport. I said that 'our time will come' over the years on usw
during mild winters, and it certainly has this week. A cold Easterly like I
remember them (but didnt that cold pool zoom in from Russia - even at 36-48h
it didnt look particularly cold to the E (unlike now with -10 to -30 NE of
Moscow)). So Ive seen snow reports from Tunisia, Lisbon and other places
over recent years and was really wondering if it would come to London again!

The interesting thing is that we've had a moderately severe winter
whilst most of northern and eastern Europe seems to have had a rather
mild one.


Will this Winter be a one off ? Who knows ? but I can go another 20 years
thinking it is possible! Still not had the milk coming out of the frozen
bottle (cause no milk was delivered - sign of the times (did the London
Buses run in 1962/63 must have) or seen a snow drift this time. But reading
Mr *******i this is all a sign of global cooling

Really? Are the mild conditions in other regions a sign of global
cooling too? Hoe about the current intense heat in part of Australia?
I'm sceptical.

However one thing I have noticed that might support his idea is that the
charts of 1000-500 mb thickness anomalies with respect to the 1961-90
average, published in "Weather" each month and covering most of the
northern hemisphere, seem to have become much more "normal" over the
course of the last year or so. Previously the areas of positive
anomalies would always be much larger and more intense than those of
negative anomalies, but by November, 2008 (the most recent chart to
hand), that seemed to have largely vanished.

If I understand it correctly, the 1000-500 mb thickness is effectively a
measure of the warmth of the lower half (in atmospheric pressure terms)
of the atmosphere, and that areas of large positive anomalies usually
correspond to warm weather at the Earth's surface, and similarly with
negative anomalies and cold conditions.

and we are in for many
Winters like this in the near future.

The British climate seems to have a tendency to deliver mild winters and
cold winters in "clumps", though with the occasional mild one
interspersed in cold clumps and vice versa. An example of a cold clump
would be from 1976-7 to 1987. So I won't be surprised if we see a few
more coldish winters in the next few years.
--
John Hall
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless
information."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)