When the temperature plunged below minus 20C in east London
 

The 'Year Without a Summer' of 1816 brought many extremes of weather...


During the opening months frequent cold blasts brought much wintry weather. Cold weather at the end of January turned severe during the second week of February.

In the early hours of the 7th heavy snow, driven by gale-force north-easterly winds, brought some of the worst winter weather this area has ever seen. Some 35mm of precipitation is recorded on the 8th - this would normally give at least one foot of level snow that could obviously be whipped up into huge drifts.

Luke Howard described the scene in his diary entry saying the abundance of snow "loaded the trees to their tops and weighed down the smaller shrubs to the ground."

The snow and polar continental air also produced perfect conditions for a textbook radiative cooling night within two days of the snowfall. The minimum recorded on the morning of the 10th: -20.6C...

https://wansteadmeteo.wordpress.com/...n-east-london/

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