In article
,
Nick writes:
Very disappointed tonight to see such a dreary, Atlantic-dominated
outlook after having avoided looking at the models and this group for
a few days in the hope that the snowy spell would materialise. Instead
2012 looks to go out in typically 2012-like style. The 15 to 30 day
forecast seems to offer no hope whatsoever for any sustained dry
weather, never mind cold, so what are people's feelings on this? Are
we locked into a pattern for the winter now, and we're heading for a
mild, wet, zonal winter a la 1997/98, 1994/95 or 1989/90 with little
hope for change until (as often happens) late Jan? Or could things
change back still before that?

Nick

There's bags of time for it to change. The 00Z GFS ensemble quite
strongly suggests that there could be a brief cold spell starting as
little as 11 days away, though it doesn't look like lasting for more
than a few days. (The operational run was a mild outlier at that stage.)
On the other hand the ECMWF out to 10 days doesn't seem to show much
scope for a cold spell developing.

Over at least the next 10 days the weather doesn't seem to become fully
zonal. Instead lows approach us from the Atlantic but then stall over to
or just to the west of the British Isles, "fended off" by an intense and
persistent anticyclone over northern European Russia. So though it will
be mild over most of the UK, it looks like remaining cold over
Scandinavia and eastern Europe, which means that should the pattern
change it could turn cold quite swiftly.
--
John Hall

"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong."
Oscar Wilde