In article ,
Dave Cornwell writes:
George Booth wrote:
On 08/02/2013 20:08, John Hall wrote:
In article ,
Dave Cornwell writes:
As you have correctly stated elsewhere Darren - no signs of any
real cold and no true Easterly or N.Easterly driven from
Scandinavia for 17 years now. If you accept people won't have
accurate information from before they were 10 years old that
means nobody under 27 can remember real cold spells. As the
opinion formers and media pundits become younger so the
definition of a bitterly cold spell becomes diluted we will see an
increasing number of these non-cold "cold spells" !

Surely December 2010 counts as a real cold spell, even if it perhaps
wasn't quite as severe in Essex as it was over most of the country.
After all, months (and especially Decembers) with a CET below zero have
always been pretty rare. ISTR that we had NE winds for some of the time,
though at other times they were more northerly.

December 2010 was the coldest since I started recording in this
part of Essex in 1978

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I standby my feeling that younger people have a different concept
of a cold spell to me!
I agree the spell in December stands out.It may have been the
coldest since then George and I know the snow was greater
further west, especially on higher ground as you are but for here
there is no comparison in severity with 1979,1981 and 1987 and in
terms of snowfall many, many others before then. Most snowfall in
the last few years has come from the west and tended to die out
further East. Pre 1990 snow often came in from the East and
petered out towards London. I worked in East London and there
were many occasions when we had six inches of snow in East
Essex and Kent only to find almost no snow in Greater London.
The days of heavy snow showers have all but gone in these parts.
Dave

I suspect that those close to the coast in East Anglia, Essex and Kent
have had a different experience from most of the rest of us, because a
greater proportion of their major snow events traditionally arrived on
strong E or NE winds. I accept that those set-ups seem to have become
rarer in recent years. We still see Scandinavian Highs from time to
time, but they mostly seem to be just too far north or too far east or
not quite intense enough to bring their full influence to bear on the
UK.

But for those of us away from that eastern coastal fringe, there have
still been notable cold spells and notable snowfalls, with something of
a resurgence in them in recent years. When you said "If you accept
people won't have accurate information from before they were 10 years
old that means nobody under 27 can remember real cold spells", you
seemed to be generalising from your own experience to the whole country,
and I think that was what was irritating me.
--
John Hall

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