Reminds a little of 51 years ago (ok I wasn't actually around)..... Jet way up north.....  Giant Euro High.... slack southerlies wafting in..... pattern locked in for winter.....

http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/1962/Rrea00119621206.gif

That's the problem with taking one chart.  The weather is a movie not a single photograph.  If you run the sequence from November through to December you'll see it was quite different.

I don't think the pattern is 'locked in for winter' but I'd give you very good odds if you think anything resembling late December 1962 will appear in the next 3 weeks.....

Much as I'd love to be wrong.

Yes, I appreciate all that you're saying, and that my analogy doesn't really stand up to strong scrutiny.   However, if we went back in time to the end of November 1962, and had charts for the following 10 days ahead of us (assuming the models verfied 100% of course), it wouldn't be very far away at all from what we have stretching ahead to mid-month here.   Of course, I'm not saying that 1962/63 will repeat, just that we really have no clear idea of what the weather will do towards the month that some people have already written off.   Late December 2012 looks dire in terms of the weather pattern, yet a fortnight later or so much of the country has lying snow.

Andrew  

They are having something - maybe it is localised:

Interesting that you say that, because sometimes I wonder what that cold winter would have looked like in terms of the forecast models (although the science has moved on hugely since then).  If you run the 62/63 winter sequence there were quite a few occasions when you would have put money on a breakdown but it never came, although it was close on several occasions.

As Martin said earlier the problem is the jet alignment - and those upper heights to our south/south east.  All that has happened lately is that the heights have displaced south briefly and then rolled back.

We need to see a drop of 50-60 dam in the 500hPa thickness over the continent and a similar shift the other way to our north - and that's a very major pattern shift.

Pretty similar set up to this day in 1971 also, although I gather that the remainder of that winter was pretty much unremarkable. More positively, the general model outlook for a fairly long fetch southerly, the result of Atlantic low pushing up against a north Europe high, bears a resemblance to the pattern which occurred shortly before the big Winter of 78/79.

But all this shows really is just how utterly random and chaotic weather patterns are.

On word can describe the weather for the next 10 days for many parts of the UK..that is.... FOG

Fe'****g Overcooked GFS?

Due to work commitments earlier I didn't get to post any charts from the 6z GFS but the HP certainly didnt  give us much warmth, there were days in low single figures, yes the 12z temp wise is a tad different but it might be on the mild side?

http://www.meteociel.fr/ukmo/runs/2013120612/UN144-21.GIF?06-17

UKMO offers a negatively tilted Atlantic trough. That really is as good as we have to work with right now. Considerably more potential than GFS' version, though.

It's really not happening for either camp is it?
Days and days of fairly benign, often cool but never very mild or cold weather to come.
Maybe the odd local spot in the northeast touching a 12 or 13; maybe the odd coldspot in the southeast catching a frost or two.

Looks set in until the week before Christmas perhaps.

With each run the AO becomes more negative, the heights become higher and the surface high is positioned more favouribly. No where near as good as the previous bering high, but things are starting to look very interesting now. A few more upgrades and I might be talking about a pattern switch after mid month. 

You seem to be quite hopeful of something, Quantum! The models don't look overly hopeful to me at this moment in time tbh.

Not as much as last time when I was almost certain we would get a cold spell, I guess I was right (ish ). This time, its a little different, the WAA is much less strong, and is tending to stagnate over E eurasia rather than make any progress towards the north pole or the central arctic. However there are some decent attempts to get height rises going over the arctic ocean, but the pattern is not consistant like it was last time. I can see hints of the jet stream trying to dive south over russia and some of the PV being taken along with it, that would really amplify the high on our side of the atlantic. The issue I have is the most natural solutions is for everything to be taken into canada again, or it to go directly into Europe and just end up a Euro high or something. Still, ECM will be interesting. 

I was looking at the ECM 32 EPS for Glasgow - some stonking cold outliers on that for late December/early January.

I haven't been onto the weather models since the great heat of July.  It had been very benign Autumn this year and knowing there wasn't anything interesting weatherwise in the past few months.  I hope at some point we see some decent cold and snow this winter but for now I am eager to go to Toronto next month fof nearly 3 weeks and they had a very cold start to the winter.