"John Hall" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Col writes:

"John Hall" wrote in message
. ..
In article
,
Tudor Hughes writes:
On Jan 4, 12:04 pm, James Brown wrote:

And, er, remind me, when did the '47 Winter begin?...;-)- Hide quoted
text -

February. I was 4, but dont't remember it. The same could be
said of 1956, which I do remember, and 1986, which I remember even
better. I can't quite see what you're getting at. Surely these
events, whether or not significant, can occur at any time of the
winter?

Actually the 1947 winter began on about 23th January. But I'm sure
you're right that such events can occur at any time of year. (Though
there were an unusual number of really cold Februaries from the 1940s
onwards: 1947, 1956, 1963 and 1986 all had sub-zero CETs.)

And as late as Jan 18th 1947 the set-up appears to have been
mild and zonal.

Yes, there's a chart from mid-January 1947 in Gordon Manley's "Climate
and the British Scene" (illustrating a transient ridge of high pressure
IIRC) where one would have thought that there was no prospect of really
cold weather in the next couple of weeks. If the modern computer models
had been around then, I wonder how well they would have fared.

If this group had been around then, I wonder how many would have
written off winter by mid January

Out of interest, I looked up the values from the daily CET series that
Parker, Legg and Folland published in 1992. For the second half of
January 1947 they were (presumably max+min/2):

16th: 10.0
17th: 6.9
18th: 6.3
19th: 2.8
20th: 1.6
21st: 1.8
22nd: 1.0
23rd: 0.1
24th: -0.6
25th: -0.1
26th: -1.3
27th: -1.5
28th: -2.0
29th: -6.4
30th: -5.1
31st: -2.5

High pressure which started off over France moved north and east and
eventually became a classic Scandy high with bitterly cold easterlies.
--
Col

Bolton, Lancashire
160m asl