Yes I sometimes flag that up on the homepage and have discussed the GFS temperature issue with commercial organisations several times.

Amazing output for Mildies Jacko my frogs are still happy in the pond and my daffs have the first sign of a flower coming.

PL I like mild weather but even I know this is wrong!

Where we go from here I don't know, but it really is looking like some temperature records will be broken in the next few days. 

Im sure I just heard on national tv that expecting 16c in the south tomorrow cant be sure as im half a sleep 

 Have a look at those

http://www.meteociel.com/modeles/gefs_table.php?x=306&y=141&run=0&ext=com&mode=7&sort=0

Overnight lows of 14C forecasted for here this week. Those sort of overnight temps in December  are impressive.

Has to be the most appalling winter ever - what on earth did we do to deserve this? Went into Worcester on Sunday and some trees are in blossom - they think it is spring. I really did not expect us to get such an awful winter yet again - it is the doomsday scenario. We will pay for it in the spring and early summer as always. The model output is about as far from offerring anything as it is possible and as Moomin pointed out yesterday, mild always verfies and cold rarely does.

Didn't we have a westerly based QBO in winter 2013-14? IIRC some at the time cited that as one reason for the horrendously wet winter we had that season.

It seems very exciting for the mild fans out there but IMHO I would expect revenge from the cold fans.

1. El Nino winters, whilst not conclusively, often tend to follow this pattern with the latter half of winter potentially offering the goods.


2. The raw data has consistently been hinting at a notable cool down for the 2nd half of winter.


3. What goes up must come down. Even with the weather (note: not climate), things do have a habit of balancing out.


4. If number 3 doesn't happen in time, then the cold fans can have their revenge because the odds for a colder spring/summer increase. Yes, even the cold fans may wish for hot summer weather but I find that cold winter fans can often take summer on an 'as-is' basis i.e not the be-all and end-all. The mild group will suffer the most as BBQs are left in the sheds and charts show some strikingly low temperatures for the time of year.

I don't agree with you Nordic Snowman - I like proper weather - cold and snowy winters, followed by long, hot summers, but I dare say you are right. The weather appears to be 6 months out of sequence with the calendar.

On the QBO - does anybody have a link to its current phase? As David points out, we had a persistent westerly based QBO in the previous rotten winter of 2013-14. What are the QBO forecasts looking like?

Of the last two big El Nino events, I'm only hoping that next year is more akin to 1983 than 1998. 1983 started with a very mild January, followed by a cold February and coldish April, but then an excellent summer. 1998 meanwhile had a mild/very mild Jan & Feb (especially the latter), a rather wintry spell in April which was then followed by a poor summer.

There is a mechanism by which El Nino events can cause the Pacific Jet to extend across the far-southern U.S. and into the Atlantic, encouraging lower pressure west of the Azores which edges east at times and displaces the Azores High into Europe.

This is far from a reliable process though, tending to come and go and with a different pattern for each El Nino event. The strongest examples in the last 50 years have tended to produce this more often in Jan-Feb than Dec, but for example while 1997-8 took it to extreme levels in Feb, 1982-83 had a more intermittent feature with some colder spells in between.

This year stands out for having the response so very prominent in the first half of Nov and now again in Dec with only hints of abating by month's end. This implies that the PJ extension has been at play from unusually early on for this event - however I expect that the sheer persistence and strength of the Euro High is down to other variables, in particular the North Atlantic Cold Pool that continues to be present. In summer we saw a persistent Euro High, which also brought a lot of cloud and rain but of course the temperatures were suppressed rather than raised due to the huge difference in the importance of solar insolation at that time of year. It seems that the Cold Pool in the position that it's in this year (in particular extending as far south as the Azores) encourages a mid-Atlantic trough with a corresponding Euro High.

At the end of Nov I was envisioning El Nino to boost the high again and had hoped that, working with the Cold Pool, it would generate some settled spells across much of the UK with cold nights and near average days. However, this was dependent on the polar vortex being displaced a little toward the Siberian sector, which hasn't verified well - instead it's being displaced slightly to the Atlantic, encouraging a strong polar jet that doesn't allow more than a fleeting UK high to develop.

So it is that I've found myself tracking exceptionally high temps again as opposed to admiring foggy mornings and watching for frosts. Oh well!

Incidentally, GFS' shortfall with temperature predictions was very apparent when looking at early Dec from the end of Nov; averaging the op runs of 29th and 30th gives a CET estimate of 7.9 for the first 8 days, and the actual value was 10.7*C by GW's calculations!

That's an error of -2.8*C. Shame on you GFS!

Looking in more detail, this was mostly down to night temps being way too low - in the mid-single digits as opposed to high single or low double digits. Cloud modelling issues perhaps? Or radiative cooling? The mystery deepens.

For what it's worth Coehn's latest update shows more favourable conditions for a disorganised strat to develop though mid January onwards, though to be honest I'll take what he says with a pinch of salt going off previous form.

This forum needs it's own dedicated counsellor in order to stop the inevitable wrist slitting that will inevitably ensure if this mild/wet dross continues for much longer. 

Thanks for your informative post Stormchaser - looking at the hemispheric chart it appears to support what you wrote in terms of the Pacific Jet:

http://www.meteociel.fr/modeles/gfse_cartes.php?ech=6&code=code&mode=5&mode3h=&runpara=&carte=1

I guess that if we are to clutch at any straws, we would hope that by occurring so early in the season, that it will moderate markedly as winter progresses.