Don't think so as it UK and it very clever stupid climate here will give us milder winter temps than we got today temperatures.   Watch France and Spain going to freezer while here stay mild or wet, cold rain, a bit of frost, and temperatures not far off from today values, as it been done before, and will do again.

And distinctly dodgy.

Clicking on the link to Humberside in four's post and changing on the settings in WeatherOnline's graphs it seems the minimum temperature there has been 0C for most of the last month....

13.9c here at 1pm on 26th July takes some doing. It's not even raining at the moment. 

at 13:20 it was 13.8C here, but it was raining.

At 11am the temp was just over 12C!  😕

Just 12.2C at 2pm - rain has stopped for the moment...

Must be some record low maximums today. 13.5C for me.

This is about as exciting as it gets in high summer for cold weather fans like me - temperatures at 1PM of just 11C in parts of southern England in late July is amazing, a good 10C or more below where it should be at this time of day!

It's just as amazing as that 36C was, albeit at completely opposite ends of the spectrum. It did reach 18C here before the rain started and since then it's been pegged at 13C or 14C... which, although it would be well above average, is certainly possible on a January or February afternoon.

Yes, it is incredible  the variety of weather that the British climate can throw at us.  Im embracing the gloom and have turned to the ginger wine for that warming glow, something normally reserved for the Christmas holidays!

The all time welsh minimax is very close to being broken.

It's fascinating.

I wonder if these very low day maxima are a direct response to the very low atlantic SST's ?

Yes, due to the cold North Atlantic!

I was thinking the same thing.

If anything the cold pool seems to be getting bigger to which, surely it is bound to have implications for the coming Autumn and Winter ahead.

Almost certainly yes.  The sea to our West and WSW is so vast in comparison to our tiny speck of an island and the 'peninsula of peninsulas' that is Europe, that it has to have a massive influence.  As long as the origin of the air stays to the south of around 45 degrees its warm, north of that and it gets progressively colder with the coldest anomalies around 60 degrees N just south of Greenland.

Frequent occasions of nationwide snow showers on a westerly in late Jan and Feb ! 

I'm guessing they've played a good part in it - although it's always been the case that if you:

a) have colder air aloft (850s are a few degrees below average at the moment) and

b) can get rid of the sun

...then you can get some unusually low maxima in summer, or late spring. There was that late May spell in 2006, for example, with single-figure maxima widely across southern England, caused by the sun being blotted out by thick cloud. The thing is it's really very hard to get a whole day down here from May to July where the sun is blocked throughout - it's a good 16 hours or so of cloud that you need!

When it does happen, though, the results can be amazing. Indeed, I'd wager it's the only way to get highs that are 8C or more below average for the time of year in May to July (and probably August too).

Ah, "cold zonality" - there's a phrase you won't usually see on here in the summer!

I do wonder whether the enhanced thermal gradient to our WSW will cause more in the way of intense lows later in the summer and into autumn - we'll see soon enough.

In the meantime, it's a good time for folks to make sure their central heating system still works.. best test it now rather than when it's really needed later on!

So if we went 10c below average across southern England in January, would give us maximum's of around -7c?

The average highs in January in southern England are in the order of 6 or 7C - so 10 below would be ice days with highs of -2 or -3C. Funnily enough, the sort of thing that happened on several occasions in the 80s and 90s, but since the turn of the millennium they've become almost extinct (certainly here, as the coldest maximum since 1997 has been -1.0C, as part of December 2010).

It's been a long time since those sorts of winter days with crisp sunshine and subzero maximas, the ones in 2010 here coincided with thick cloud and cold air aloft... not entirely dissimilar to the current setup!

Of course!

Need to get my brain into gear, LOL!

It will make for an interesting run up to winter should this exceptional anomoly continue. Last winter demonstrated how it was just about possible to get some wintry showers down here on a westerly, just imagine if SST's are a degree or so cooler this time around ? 

It will sure make a refreshing change to be looking for endless opportunities from the atlantic rather than getting fixated on relatively dry and cold northerlies or even rarer easterlies. 

Re. the Atlantic. I think it'll warm again over the coming few years, but once we get into the 2020's the cold AMO should really start to "bed in" and become quite common next decade...

Regardless how cool today it still lame compare to Death Valley that saw 35C max against the normal 47C July average and this came with lot of sunny spells after the recent storms on the day before.  This is far more interesting and extremely amazing how it can reach 35C without having cloud and rain all day than in here with foul cheated temps being low without sunshine and rain touching the thermometers.  If we can do the same like Death Valley we could get down as low as 10-11C with sunny spells with thunderstorms in between and strong northerly winds.  That a true cold spell but today is fake one and only done by rain and cloud so it more boring this way.

I'm guessing that the temperatures were massively suppressed in Death Valley as a result of high relative humidity caused by a very damp environment rather than anything relating to airmass or cloud / sunshine amounts.  

Shall I start a Winter 2015/16 thread? 

September is when it all kick's off for me!