Not here it hasn't been, despite the sun today has felt chilly, only reached 13.7C. In past 7 days that has been exceeded 3 times & equaled once. In that dawn time all but one night has remained above 12C 😂 insane for December.

A very mild 14c here, more like spring than the start of winter.

All Brian's fault for pointing out some 6 weeks ago what an average year it had been

14.2*C turned out to be the maximum in the end, with high cloud coming and going during the afternoon and preventing any brief spikes to higher levels.

Combined with that balmy night, the mean is 8.35*C above the LTA for the date.

I do wonder how common this sort of thing might be by 2050. Yet between 2020 and 2030 it could prove hard to come by depending on how significantly the prolonged solar minimum alters our typical winter weather patterns. Assuming there's a prolonged minimum in the first place, of course - I do wonder how the predictions of such have come about, but don't at the moment have the time to research in that area.

Edit: just realised another consequence of the extremely mild conditions; my annual mean has risen 0.02*C since the month began. Given that in a typical year it falls by around 0.5*C from the start of the month to the end, this is most unseasonable!

It's funny really - if, against all the odds, the whole month was as mild as this first week as been, the annual mean would go from being very similar to a great many others in my records (2000-2014) to being the third highest! November's already done a lot of work, taking the mean from near the LTA for Jan-Oct to half a degree above for Jan-Nov.

As it is, some cooler days are expected soon - but it may be seriously balmy again by next weekend so who knows what might happen. At the end of the month I was seeing plenty of reason to expect a chilly spell during the final week or so of the month, but now it's at best 50/50 based on the most recent guidance. A record December would be amusing in its own right but to be honest I'd rather a seasonal spell with frost, crisp sunshine and most importantly of all, dry conditions across the likes of Cumbria and SW Scotland!

With the ongoing mild to very mild temps, it show that UK can manage to get such high temps day or night but why last summer we were denied from getting high temps while rest of the continent was baking hot.  Seeing 12-13C at night at 17 hours pure darkness really show that UK can get high temps anytime of the year.  So why not in summer months when we only get 4 hours total darkness cannot bring minimum temps to 21-23 at nights frequently like in N America, they do that even on non-heat waves days.

A big dent on our 2015 average results temps due to cooler than normal summer to well above average winter with temps almost static all year around.

A new UK date record set yesterday of 16.4c, previous was 16.1c set in 1921.

Locally we saw 15.6c yesterday evening at my AWS at Sallachy near Kyle Of Lochalsh.

And the CET Max is being shown provisionally as 14.6C for yesterday which would make it the second highest December CET Max since daily maxima started in 1878.

The highest December CET Max was 14.7 in 1977 (23/12)

(It may get revised down at month-end - I'm sure GW will have more info)

12.4c. Maximum here.. 

I wonder if the first week could be a contender for the highest mean max for the first 7 days: currently listed as 13C?

My CET estimate for the first 8 days of December 2015 is 10.66C.

Previous warmest first 8 days of December was 10.08C in 1979. So this is easily the warmest start to winter on record since 1772.

None of the individual dates this year has set a date record. It has just been consistently mild throughout the first 8 days.

4 Days of + 13. c this month....

'LTA' refers to my own records for 2000-2014. 'High Min' and 'High Max' are date records taken from that same series.

Here's a look at where my location, just south of Salisbury in Hampshire, currently stands temperature-wise.

Just as November did, the month has kicked off with an incredibly mild first week, this time even more so due to the fact that we're a month further toward the cold end of the year. 6 of the first 9 have seen record high maximums, and 7 record high minimums. The latter are the most exceptional, as they've been exceeding the previous records by 1-2*C and would probably be among the top few even in a series going back to the mid-1800's. 

The 24 hour mean sits at 11.88 to the 8th which is a massive 6.67*C above the LTA. This follows 3 days that had date anomalies of +7.51 (Sun), +8.23 (Mon) and +7.38 (Tue). All of these anomalies are beyond the largest seen in November (+7.18 on 15th).

As can be seen above, GFS projects continuing mild conditions for the next week, though not exceptional, followed by a balmy weekend of extraordinary proportions. The chances of that verifying are low, with a more settled, cooler option from ECM for example, but it would be fitting with recent times and the way that the models have tended to adjust; for example the 12z GFS op of the 30th had the CET region at around 8.5*C to 8th Dec, yet the actual value is around 10.7*C - so the model under-cooked it by more than 2*C which is frankly appalling! 

One consequence of all this went buzzing past my ear this morning - a wasp, on its way back from visiting some out-of-season flowers.

Yeah, sorry, I meant mean max; not mean temperature. What was the mean maximum at that date GW?

BBC forecasters are now starting to float the possibility of records being broken this week / month. 

I did wonder, & toyed with the idea of a fohn-induced temperature a couple of weeks ago, given the projected long-fetch, humid SSW'lies. Where's likely to be the favoured spot? It doesn't look as if the warmest uppers will reach the NE of Scotland; the 10C uppers aren't likely to reach land high enough to benefit from the adiabatic influence. So- E. of the SW moors? North of the Downs? What's the thinking?

At least a high temp record would help to offset some of the growing misery on the other thread!

We're in Germany to see Christmas markets later this week. I was expecting to take cold weather gear but it seems I needn't even bother with a coat! 

Accuweather temp forecasts for Bonn starting Wed: 13 -15 - 13 - 12 - 12C. Low temps 7 - 6 - 6 - 6 - 6. That 15 on Thursday is 9C above the LTA.

This may have been posted before- apologies, posters; but it's a great site showing UKs highest temperature for every day of the year. The 2006 July event is there but there are several missing- Oct 31 2014; and of course July 1 and Nov 1 (and 2?) this year.

http://www.torro.org.uk/hightempsyear.php

Someone needs to update this excellent reference material.

In December, as you might expect at a time when insolation features less significantly than airmass and local effects, Scotland & especially N. Wales feature strongly with Achnashellach holding the month record; but there are numerous English date records, throughout the month, including places such as Devon, Norfolk and London.

The targets for this week will be Wednesday: 17.1C (unlikely); Thursday 17.9C (a challenge); Saturday only 15.6C (highly possible) if these charts are still correct for these dates.

So here we are with another balmy update featuring sensationally high observations for the time of year and an outlandish GFS projection. Not only that but GFS had the overnight lows more than 3 and 2.5*C below the actual values for the past two nights successively so who knows how high the temps could hold up Wed-Thu and Fri-Sat?

Travelling about yesterday I noticed that my location is tending to display more similarity to the coastal stretch than areas inland, which is why the nights in particular have continued to be so balmy even as the majority of the mainland has experienced some chilly conditions.

The double spike in temps showing up for Thu and Sat stands out like a fox caught in the headlights. In all my years paying attention to the weather I've never seen anything above 14*C (and funnily enough that's also as high as this month has so far managed) so it would a substantial step up even to have one day hitting 15*C, let alone two!

So what's that doing to the monthly mean? Well, how about I illustrate that with a snapshot of my spreadsheet records - and one that also shows the relative lack of rain and sun:

So - that's the rain obs for each day on the far left, followed by sunshine in hours (but it's a little unreliable), then the monthly mean-to-date, followed by the date anomaly, then the monthly mean-to-date anomaly.

My use of conditional formatting certainly makes the huge positive anomalies stand out doesn't it? The final 5 are based on the GFS 12z and that +8.95*C (based on a low of 12*C and a high of 15*C), if it verifies, will be the most anomalously warm day of the year to date, just about beating the 8.92*C of July 1st. 

Interestingly enough, while it's normal for it to be warmest in the far south, the difference to the CET zone is even greater than would usually be seen this year. This can be inferred from the fact that the CET zone is not far from 4*C above that region's LTA to the 14th, while my local mean is a whopping 5.9*C above my local LTA. Even accounting for the differences in the periods used for those LTA, that's a serious difference!

To think, my mean will almost certainly be passing +6.0*C on Wednesday and just look at that +6.34*C to Saturday... the weather's officially gone nuts.